British Museum Reading Room
The British Museum Reading Room, situated in the centre of the Great Court of the British Museum, used to be the main reading room of the British Library. In 1997, this function moved to the new British Library building at St Pancras, London, but the Reading Room remains in its original form at the British Museum.
Designed by Sydney Smirke and opened in 1857, the Reading Room was in continual use until its temporary closure for renovation in 1997. It was reopened in 2000, and from 2007 to 2017 it was used to stage temporary exhibitions. It has since been closed while its future use remains under discussion.
History
Construction and design
In the early 1850s the museum library was in need of a larger reading room and the then-Keeper of Printed Books, Antonio Panizzi, following an earlier competition idea by William Hosking, came up with the thought of a round room in the central courtyard. The building was designed by Sydney Smirke and was constructed between 1854 and 1857. The building used cast iron, concrete, glass and the latest technology in ventilation and heating. The dome, inspired by the Pantheon in Rome, has a diameter of 42.6 metres but is not technically free standing: constructed in segments on cast iron, the ceiling is suspended and made out of papier-mâché. Book stacks built around the reading room were made of iron to take the huge weight and add fire protection. There were forty kilometres of shelving in the stacks prior to the library's relocation to the new site.The British Museum Library
The Reading Room was officially opened on 2 May 1857 with a 'breakfast' laid out on the catalogue desks. A public viewing was held between 8 and 16 May, attracting over 62,000 visitors. Tickets to it included a plan of the library.Regular users had to apply in writing and be issued a reader's ticket by the Principal Librarian. During the period of the British Library, access was restricted to registered researchers only; however, reader's credentials were generally available to anyone who could show that they were a serious researcher. The Reading Room was used by a large number of famous figures, including notably Sun Yat-sen, Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, Friedrich Hayek, Bram Stoker, Mahatma Gandhi, Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, George Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, Vladimir Lenin, Virginia Woolf, Arthur Rimbaud, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, H. G. Wells and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
In 1973, the British Library Act 1972 detached the library department from the British Museum, but it continued to host the now separated British Library in the same Reading Room and building as the museum until 1997.
Closure and restoration
In 1997 the British Library moved to its own specially constructed building next to St Pancras Station and all the books and shelving were removed. As part of the redevelopment of the Great Court, the Reading Room was fully renovated and restored, including the papier-mâché ceiling which was repaired to its original colour scheme, having previously undergone radical redecorations.The Reading Room was reopened in 2000, allowing all visitors, and not just library ticket-holders, to enter it. It held a collection of 25,000 books focusing on the cultures represented in the museum along with an information centre and the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Centre.
Exhibition space
In 2007 the books and facilities installed in 2000 were removed, and the Reading Room was relaunched as a venue for special exhibitions, beginning with one featuring China's Terracotta Army. The general library for visitors moved to a room accessible through nearby Room 2, but closed permanently on 13 August 2011. This is an earlier library that has also had distinguished users, including Thomas Babington Macaulay, William Makepeace Thackeray, Robert Browning, Giuseppe Mazzini, Charles Darwin and Charles Dickens.A selection of past exhibitions:
Exhibit | From | To |
The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army | 13 September 2007 | 6 April 2008 |
Hadrian: Empire and Conflict | 24 July 2008 | 27 October 2008 |
Shah ʿAbbas: The Remaking of Iran | 19 February 2009 | 14 June 2009 |
Indian Summer | May 2009 | September 2009 |
Montezuma: Aztec Ruler | 24 September 2009 | 24 January 2010 |
Italian Renaissance drawings | 22 April 2010 | 25 July 2010 |
Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead: Journey Through the Afterlife | 4 November 2010 | 6 March 2011 |
Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe | 23 June 2011 | 9 October 2011 |
Hajj: journey to the heart of Islam | 26 January 2012 | 15 April 2012 |
Shakespeare: staging the world | 19 July 2012 | 25 November 2012 |
Life and death in Pompeii and Herculaneum | 28 March 2013 | 29 September 2013 |
Vikings: life and legend | 6 March 2014 | 22 June 2014 |
Ancient lives, new discoveries | 22 May 2014 | 12 July 2015 |
Germany: memories of a nation | 16 October 2014 | 25 January 2015 |
Indigenous Australia: enduring civilisations | 23 April 2015 | 2 August 2015 |
Drawing in silver and gold: Leonardo to Jasper Johns | 10 September 2015 | 6 December 2015 |
Celts: art and identity | 24 September 2015 | 31 January 2016 |
Egypt: faith after the pharaohs | 29 October 2015 | 7 February 2016 |
Sunken Cities: Egypt's lost worlds | 19 May 2016 | 27 November 2016 |
Hokusai: beyond the Great Wave | 25 May 2017 | 13 August 2017 |
Architecture
This Greek Revival style building sits at the heart of British academia in London's Bloomsbury.With its four vast wings, 43 Greek temples inspired columns, triangular pediment, and enormous steps, it's certainly not what you'd expect to see in central London.
Its grandeur was designed to reflect all the 'wondrous objects housed inside' by the architect Sir Robert Smirke in 1823. It emulated classical Greek architecture – a style that had become increasingly popular since the 1750s when western Europeans 'rediscovered' ancient Greece.
The building was completed in 1852.This building using the latest technology: concrete floors, a cast-iron frame filled in with London stock brick, and Portland stone on the front layer of the building.
The quadrangle building won the Royal Institute of British Architects' Gold Medal in 1853.
Since then, more recent developments include the round Reading Room with its domed ceiling and the Norman Foster-designed Great Court which opened in 2000.