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:
ExhibitFromTo
The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army13 September 20076 April 2008
Hadrian: Empire and Conflict24 July 200827 October 2008
Shah ʿAbbas: The Remaking of Iran19 February 200914 June 2009
Indian SummerMay 2009September 2009
Montezuma: Aztec Ruler24 September 200924 January 2010
Italian Renaissance drawings22 April 201025 July 2010
Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead: Journey Through the Afterlife4 November 20106 March 2011
Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe23 June 20119 October 2011
Hajj: journey to the heart of Islam26 January 201215 April 2012
Shakespeare: staging the world19 July 201225 November 2012
Life and death in Pompeii and Herculaneum28 March 201329 September 2013
Vikings: life and legend6 March 201422 June 2014
Ancient lives, new discoveries22 May 201412 July 2015
Germany: memories of a nation16 October 201425 January 2015
Indigenous Australia: enduring civilisations23 April 20152 August 2015
Drawing in silver and gold: Leonardo to Jasper Johns10 September 20156 December 2015
Celts: art and identity24 September 201531 January 2016
Egypt: faith after the pharaohs29 October 20157 February 2016
Sunken Cities: Egypt's lost worlds19 May 201627 November 2016
Hokusai: beyond the Great Wave25 May 201713 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.