On the public libraries, museum study rooms, and Bloomsbury institutions that remain open to anyone who asks
London has more reading rooms open to the public than most cities have libraries. This is not widely understood, even by Londoners.
London has more reading rooms open to the public than most cities have libraries. This is not widely understood, even by Londoners. The assumption is that the research libraries — the British Library, the Wellcome Collection, the Guildhall Library, the London Library — are for academics or members, with the appropriate barriers to entry. The reality is more democratic and less advertised.
The British Library's Reader Pass is free and available to anyone with a legitimate reason to use the collections — 'legitimate reason' being interpreted generously. Writers, researchers, people working on a specific question, people who cannot access the materials elsewhere. The application takes fifteen minutes and the card arrives within two weeks. The reading rooms beyond the pass requirement are, for the most part, better than any café for concentrated work: no music, stable temperature, the ambient sound of pages turning and pencils moving.
The Wellcome Collection's library on Euston Road is another register entirely. Medical history, the history of the body, anthropology of illness and healing — the collection extends into visual culture (the Wellcome Collection's founding principle was that medical objects are cultural objects) in a way that makes the reading room genuinely interdisciplinary. The building's public galleries on the floors below have permanent and temporary exhibitions that extend the archive into public view. Free to enter, no membership required for the public spaces.
The British Museum's Reading Room — the round room under the Great Court's glass roof — is closed to general use now, reserved for Museum scholarly use and occasional public exhibitions. But the library of the Courtauld Institute, in Somerset House, is open to researchers with appropriate purpose. The Soane Museum's library is accessible by appointment. The City of London's Guildhall Library holds the London business and trade archives open to the public.
The London Library on St James's Square is a private membership library — the one that requires the membership fee that has been a source of conversation since Carlyle founded it in 1841. The fee is real; the membership is worth consideration for anyone spending a month or more in the city who needs access to a working literary library. The open stacks alone are the argument: seven floors of books organised by subject, accessible without a request slip, browsable in the manner of a bookshop but with the depth of a research collection.
What these spaces share is the quality that the reading room specifically provides and that the public library in its twenty-first century iteration has partly traded away: silence as a resource. The silence of a reading room is not the silence of absence but of collective attention — everyone in the room has agreed to the same set of terms, which creates a specific kind of productive company.