The British Library: An Understated Icon
The British Library Piazza and main building, with St Pancras in the background. Image credit: Tony Antoniou.
By Thomas Gibbs
The British Library is one of my favourite places in London: 14 floors, holding nearly 14 million books, and over 170 million items overall (the exact number is unknown). It is a veritable cathedral of learning. All this sits in the most enormous and yet understated public building in the UK. Right next door to the elaborate Neo-Gothic St Pancras Station, the British Library’s towering red-brick halls were controversial when they were first proposed by husband-and-wife team Colin St John Wilson and MJ Long. King Charles was especially vocal in his criticism, arguing that it looked ‘more like the assembly hall of an academy for secret police’ than a library. Indeed, there is something vaguely dystopian about the structure, it looks like an Imperial base from Star Wars (I’m sure an episode of Andor will be filmed there soon enough) but I love it for its brutality.
The British Library Newspaper Archives in Boston Spa, Yorkshire. Image Credit: Kippa Matthews.
Fundamentally, this is a warehousing project. As a legal deposit library, the British Library is given a copy of every single book published in the UK and (since 2000) every book published in the Republic of Ireland. That means they have an enormous and rapidly growing collection, with new annexes and secondary sites opening in the years since the main location opened in 1998. Remarkably the gargantuan London site holds only 30% of the overall collection. That’s because the library also incorporates the British Newspaper Archive (which holds almost every newspaper published in the UK since 1840), an enormous collection of maps, vast quantities of government records (including substantial Colonial Office holdings that have become the backbone of the Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections), over a million CD and cassette recording from the former National Sound Archive, and petabytes of digital content.
The British Museum Reading Room in 1924. Image courtesy of the British Museum.
Despite this, the British Library has fairly humble origins. Originally it was a part of the British Museum, for a long time based in the iconic circular reading room at its heart, where famous writers from Virginia Woolf to Karl Marx wrote their masterpieces. The three foundational collections from the British museum (the Cotton, Harley, and Sloane manuscripts) still contain some of the library’s most iconic works, such as the Lindisfarne Gospels (c.715). Yet the library has grown considerably since then, most notably with the addition of the Old Royal Library in 1757 and the King’s Collection (George III’s private library) in 1823 which now stands in the lobby on striking seven-story glass shelves. One thing that makes the library’s collection so remarkable is its diversity (some might say eclecticism). Unlike other European national libraries which tend to focus their collections on their own region, the British Library buys books and manuscripts from all over the world – today it holds materials in over 400 languages. Its Oriental collection is among the best in Europe.
Once the Library was officially refounded in 1973, a campaign began to unite the collections under a single roof. Initial plans involved demolishing whole blocks of Bloomsbury to provide space but local resistance meant that a new site had to be found. Because the library was given space to breathe at the new Euston Road site, Wilson and Long were able to give it communal spaces for public use, including a piazza featuring Paolozzi and Gormley sculptures and an incredible foyer. This is a remarkable place to work (and it has a great coffee shop) but the vibe is very much community-focused, you can come here to meet friends too. The lobby sprawls across multiple floors, with escalators up and down, and tables arranged in secluded corners (my favourite one is on-top of a lift shaft, only accessible by a bridge).
The lobby of The British Library from the aforementioned lift-shaft table, showing the cafe and King’s Collection shelving. Image Credit: Mike Peel.
The community-focus has to be my favourite thing about the British Library. The collections are open to anyone who has genuine need of them, and widening access to academic materials is a big part of the library’s mission. All you need to do is register for a reading card and you’re in. The process of getting a book out is surprisingly simple, although the rituals of security make it all feel rather more special than getting a book out of the university library. First you have to go to a cavernous locker room and put away everything except your laptop, notebook, and pencil (no pens allowed). Then you place these in a special transparent plastic bag and report to the reading room you want to visit (there are 11, including two for humanities, three for science, and one each for manuscripts, maps, music, and businesses). After a security check, you go up to the desk and they just give the item to you. That was the thing that shocked me. In the map room, on a balcony overlooking the main reading room, I was just handed a unique hundred-year-old map of Hong Kong, with no ceremony at all. I wasn’t even given anything to support it, I just carried it in my bare hands over to a desk.
I love the openness of this collection; anyone can go and find something they’re interested in or use the collections to advance research further. And if their research is ever published, the library will automatically get a copy of that too. The library’s community-focus is further extended by their incredible public exhibitions, which are only set to grow with the planned £1.1bn extension at the back. This new foyer will incorporate further community space, a garden, offices for science-focused businesses that require access to the Library’s collections, and (eventually) a station on CrossRail 2, the successor to the Elizabeth Line, further integrating the station into London’s transport system (one day you might even be able to get from Paris to the British Library without ever going outside).
Artists renders of the new extension, showing its striking scale. Images courtesy of The British Library.
Unfortunately, much of the library’s enormous collection is currently inaccessible because the library is still struggling to recover from the October 2023 cyberattack by Rhysdia, an online ransomware gang. The gang took around 600GB of data, and, when the Library refused to pay the £600k ransom, deleted it, later releasing it onto the dark web. The effects of the attack have been catastrophic, costing the library around £7m, making the catalogue inaccessible, destroying online collections, and effectively pausing hundreds of researchers’ work. The economic costs will be felt across the UK’s science and academic sectors; just ask your professors, many of whom’s work has been affected by the attack. Some PHD candidates were left unable to complete their doctorates at all. This situation was worsened by the library’s lack of effective backups and their refusal to let other archives, like archive.org, host copies of their manuscripts. Ironically, the library now relies on archive.org’s scan of Yale Library’s 1910 catalogue of the British Museum’s manuscripts. If you want to access one, you fill in a Microsoft Form. This is, suffice it to say, a less-than-ideal way of accessing a national archive.
However, work is underway to repair the damage, and institutions worldwide are learning from the British Library’s unfortunate example to tighten up security against future attacks. Despite their recent struggles, the British Library has faced worse (notably the Blitz, which cost the collection thousands of books and newspapers during World War II). I am confident that the Library will recover but even without a fully functioning catalogue or its online manuscript collection, the British Library remains one of the most incredible public resources in the world, one of the best study spots in London, and an amazing trip out for any bookworm like me!
The British Library is open every day (9:30-20:00 Monday-Thursday, with slightly reduced opening hours at Weekends)