British Library

In 1998 the British Library moved to these spanking-new premises between King’s Cross and Euston stations. At a cost of £500 million, it was Britain’s most expensive building, and not one that is universally loved; Colin St John Wilson’s exterior of straight lines of red brick, which Prince Charles reckoned was akin to a ‘secret-police building’, is certainly not to all tastes. But even people who don’t like the building from the outside can’t fault the spectacularly cool and spacious interior. It is the nation’s principal copyright library and stocks one copy of every British publication as well as historic manuscripts, books and maps from the British Museum. The library counts some 186 miles of shelving on four basement levels and will have some 12 million volumes when it reaches the limit of its storage capacity. At the centre of the building is the wonderful King’s Library, the 65,000-volume collection of the insane George III, which was given to the nation by his son, George IV, in 1823 and is now housed in a six-storey, 17m-high glass-walled tower. To the left as you enter are the library’s excellent bookshop and exhibition galleries. Most of the complex is devoted to storage and scholarly research, but there are also several public displays including the John Ritblat Gallery: Treasures of the British Library, which spans almost three millennia and every continent. Among the most important documents here are the Magna Carta (1215); the Codex Sinaiticus, the first complete text of the New Testament, written in Greek in the 4th century; a Gutenberg Bible (1455), the first Western book printed using movable type; Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623); manuscripts by some of Britain’s best-known authors (eg Lewis Carroll, Jane Austen, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy); and even some of the Beatles’ earliest handwritten lyrics. You can hear historic recordings, such as the first one ever, made by Thomas Edison in 1877, James Joyce reading from Ulysses and Nelson Mandela’s famous speech at the Rivonia trial in 1964, at the National Sound Archive Jukeboxes, where the selections are changed regularly. The Turning the Pages exhibit allows you a ‘virtual browse’ through several important texts including the Sforza Book of Hours, the Diamond Sutra and a Leonardo da Vinci notebook. The Philatelic Exhibition, next to the John Ritblat Gallery, is based on collections established in 1891 with the bequest of the Tapling Collection, and now consists of more than 80,000 items, including postage and revenue stamps, postal stationery and first-day covers from almost every country and from all periods. The Workshop of Words, Sounds & Images documents the development of writing and communicating through the written word by carefully examining the work of early scribes, printers and bookbinders. The sound section compares recordings on different media, from early-20th-century wax cylinders to modern CDs. Access to the reading rooms is by reader’s pass only. See the website for details of how to apply for one and the conditions that need to be met. There are guided tours of the library’s public areas at 3pm Monday, Wednesday and Friday and at 10.30am and 3pm Saturday, and another that includes a visit to one of the reading rooms 01937-546 546 to make a booking. Further tours, including free tours of the reading rooms focusing on how books are ordered, and tours of the conservation studios, are also regularly available – see the website for details.