British Library

Location: 96 Euston Rd., London NW1 2DB
Opening times: Monday to Thursday 9.30am – 8.00pm; Friday 9.30am – 6.00pm; Saturday 9.30 – 5.00pm; Sunday 11.00am – 5.00pm
Entry: Free of charge.
Access: Local parking available at a charge. Alternatively, the nearest rail station is St. Pancras International and the nearest underground is King’s Cross St Pancras.

I don’t know how many documentaries I’ve seen featuring someone walking into the British Library, donning white gloves, and pouring breathlessly over some ancient tome like Beowulf. And today, it’s my turn. Well, the walking into the Library bit, not the white gloves and tome-pouring. But, as we shall see later, I did get a peek at Beowulf.

The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is home to over 170 million items, which includes not only books but also newspapers, maps, sound recordings, photographs, patents, and stamps. As a legal deposit library it receives a copy of every book published in the UK and Ireland, meaning four of that 170 million plus were penned by yours truly. It’s pretty cool knowing my humble scribblings are mingling with the works of literary titans in this truly magnificent building. Or perhaps they languish with some of the library’s more obscure titles, such as Fish Who Answer the Telephone, and Other Studies in Experimental Biology (1937), What is a Cow? And Other Questions That Might Occur to You While Walking the Thames Path (2000), and The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification (2006). Much to my delight, the last two are available on Amazon. That’s Christmas sorted!

*The British Library is kind of hard to miss. This is the Euston Road gate, designed by David Kindersley and Lida Cardozo, 1998.*

The library was created, courtesy of the British Library Act 1972, on 1 July 1973, and the collection consisted of the national library that had until then been part of the British Museum, and the absorption of organisations such as the British National Bibliography and the National Sound Archive. The original national library stemmed from a series of private collections bequeathed in the 18^th century, such as the Sir Hans Sloane Collection, the Robert Harley Collection, and the collection of Sir Robert Cotton. These were later joined by the Old Royal Library, donated by George II, and the King’s Library, assembled by George III. and given to the nation by his son George IV.

I am a fan of brutalist architecture as regular readers of this site will know, and the British Library is a spectacular example of that style. The red brick cladding was to ensure the building complemented St. Pancras station next door. 10 million handmade bricks were used.

The stunning building was designed by the splendidly named Sir Colin St. John Wilson and his wife, the American architect MJ Long. Construction began on the Euston Road Site in 1982 and the library was completed in 1997 and opened by the Queen the following year, by which time it had run £350m over the original budget. It was the largest public building built in the UK in the 20^th century.

Astonishingly, and perhaps unsurprisingly considering the brutalist design came well after the style’s heyday, the building had its bashers. A parliamentary committee decried it as “one of the ugliest buildings in the world” and the then Prince Charles, who had recently taken up architectural criticism as a hobby, sniffed that it was like “a dim collection of sheds groping for some symbolic significance”. The laugh’s on them as in 2015 it was awarded the highest heritage honour when granted Grade 1 listed status for “outstanding architectural and historical interest”.

*The massive* Newton After Blake (1995) is by the Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi and is, as the title suggests, based on a work by William Blake, Newton: Personification of a Man Limited by Reason (1795).

The British Library remembers Anne Frank. The Anne Frank Tree (left) was planted in June 1998 and commemorates “Anne Frank and all the children killed in wars and conflict” in the 20th century. The sculpture (right), by Doreen Kern, is inside the library and was commissioned to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Frank’s birth in 1929.

Visitors can come in and explore the library at their leisure, but there are also a couple of tour options available, each costing £10.00 and lasting approximately one hour. The ‘treasures tour’ runs daily and the ‘building tour’ is available on Fridays and Sundays. Annie and I booked the treasures tour, so let’s have a look at some of the gems we uncovered.

The six-story King’s Library Tower forms the centrepiece of the library and contains *George III*‘s collection of over 65,000 books and the 20,240 volumes that comprised the library of politician and bibliophile Thomas Grenville (1755 – 1846). How big is that? Well, if someone read one book a day from the King’s Library it would take them 219 years to read the complete collection.

A brief detour. Some things inexplicably stay with you, and for me *one of those things* is the Beowulf story (I said we would get back to him). Back in the late sixties my mother bought me a subscription to the children’s educational magazine Look and Learn, and I credit this more than anything with sparking my love of history. It was also where I first read Beowulf, heavily abridged and in comic strip form, and I thought it was absolutely sensational. Above is Ron Embleton’s atmospheric cover of issue 440, on sale 20 June 1970, which contained the first installment of the story (artwork © Look and Learn). Over the years I have read many versions, from Tolkien’s and Heaney’s translations to adaptations for children’s picture books to Janina Ramirez’s Ladybird Experts book, and it still casts a spell, even if I question the interruptions and digressions within the tale (a bit like this one!) and the missing fifty years between Grendel’s mother and the dragon. All of which leads to…

…THIS! The real deal! The only surviving mediaeval manuscript of the tale, believed to have been written during the reign of Æthelred the Unready (978 – 1016CE). This was a genuine thrill, and the unquestionable highlight of my visit.

*Arguably more famous than* Beowulf is Shakespeare’s First Folio. This was published seven years after the bard’s death in 1616 and contained 36 of his plays, half of which had previously been printed as cheap single play editions. The other half, though… If not for the First Folio masterpieces such as Macbeth, The Tempest, and Twelfth Night might have been lost.

*He might have been a big deal in his day, but here on the register for deaths in St. Helena on 5 May 1821 is Napoleon, tucked between the Bagleys and the Berrys*.

*‘Jane Austen asked her friends and family what they thought of her novels, and here in her own handwriting are their ‘Opinions of Mansfield Park’* *(1814 – 1815). The glasses and the spectacles case also belonged to Austin.*

From Beowulf to the Beatles. On the left are John Lennon’s handwritten draft lyrics to ‘She Said She Said’, which would appear on the 1966 album Revolver. On the right are 1967 sketches of Lennon and George Harrison drawn by Paul McCartney in response to biographer Hunter Davies asking him what his bandmates looked like in the the late 1950s, in the days of the Quarrymen. Both items were purchased from Davies, the lyrics in 2013 and the sketches in 2022.

*Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! And yet here they are, in Michael Palin’s handwritten Monty Python script*, *donated to the library by Palin in 2017.*

An Enigma M4 machine on display at the entrance to the Alan Turing Institute within the library. This model dates from 1944 and was used to encrypt communications between German Navy bases and U-boats at sea.

Destination or Diversion?

Our one hour tour ended up running about twenty minutes longer, then there was time spent having a look around on our own, and then we must have spent at least half an hour in the excellent shop, and I am sure there is plenty that we missed. All of which is a long-winded of saying the British Library’s a destination.

Destination or Diversion?

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