The British Library
The property boom and Thatcherism dried up in
the 1990s. The King’s Cross and St. Pancras
area remained the seedy haunt of prostitutes and drug-users, the transient
and homeless—until reinvigorated first by the library and now by the
new railroad terminal. Nevertheless, the rear of the library complex still
looks crudely truncated. To compensate for the reduced space, state-of-the-art
warehousing and book-handling facilities have been developed at Boston Spa
in Yorkshire, some 200 miles north of London, where space is considerably
cheaper; the enormous newspaper and magazine archive remains in the
dismal outer suburb of Colindale, where it was first moved in 1905.
Prince Charles, passing the library site in the 1980s,
glimpsed a half-built concrete shell and likened it to a Stalinist
secret-police headquarters. This was all the encouragement the tabloid
press needed; spotting an easy target, they ganged up on the library and
gave it the roughest of rides, jeering when costs inevitably spiraled and
shelving collapsed. There was an almost universal ignorance about the uniquely
demanding construction standards and the stunning engineering solution: mining
out each basement level from the slab above to prevent the whole of St. Pancras
Station from slipping, with a sea of London clay, into the hole. No one sang
the praises of the intricate and perfectly executed brickwork, or the magnificent
piazza that gradually emerged over the deep basement levels. Readers and
academics, too, found themselves siding with the sneering detractors over
the supposed insult to their traditions and sacrosanct places in the Reading
Room.
Thus the British Library has had a short but
turbulent history, suffering insult and ignominy for a good half of its life
from the unlikely combination of the tabloid press and the royal family.
Despite mountains of ill-informed and simply ignorant reporting (all carefully
cataloged and preserved in the library’s extensive newspaper warehouse,
of course) and government policy-reversals, the library quietly got on with
meeting the very real challenges of the twenty-first century.
The building—a complex of the most intricately
engineered space, as much below as above ground—straddles the tunnels
of the London Underground. Yet the collection resides in carefully controlled
and stable conditions with a delivery system designed to minimize the once-endless
waiting time for books.
Today, there is almost universal agreement that
the resultant space and working environment is far superior to the old facilities.
The scale is magnificent and well adapted to digital technology—the site boasts the largest
WiFi hotspot in central London. The collection is far more accessible to
the general population and over 140,000 reader passes have been issued.
If your interest is that of a tourist rather than a reader, which exhibition
do you head for? The Gutenberg Bibles? The Lindisfarne Gospels, a seventh-century
Celtic manuscript masterpiece? A 1,200-year-old Chinese scroll, the Diamond
Sutra, one of the world’s oldest printed works? Or perhaps something
more modern, like an original copy of the Magna Carta (the library has
two), the sole surviving manuscript of Beowulf, or a First Folio of Shakespeare?
The towering King’s Library—60,000 books
donated by George IV in 1823—rises through the various levels and
dominates the main entrance hall. Can you imagine a happier solution for
a space originally designated for a gigantic card index suddenly made
redundant by the computer revolution? Elsewhere there are
constant exhibitions reinforcing the unique appeal of books for new
generations. The recent bicentennial celebration of Hans Christian Andersen
was literally overshadowed by a gigantic origami swan swooping over the exhibition.
Like all major public institutions in the U.K.,
the British Library is under constant pressure to “perform” for
the taxpayers, rather than act as some intimate academic club. This leads
to a potential conflict.
“The curatorial role has always been that of a
tightrope walker,” explains Dr. Michelle Brown, manuscripts
specialist and former curator of the Lindisfarne Gospels, a passionate
advocate of public access. “You need to act as a responsible
custodian for material with a view to its long-term preservation, but still
recognizing that these things have to live as well. It’s no good just
putting them on ice; it’s getting the right people alongside the
right materials at the right stage in both their histories, so they make
the most of the encounter.”
Dr. Clive Field, the director of scholarship
and collections, sees the institution performing a similar balancing act. “If you go back to the library’s foundation,” he said,
“the collections have always been there for the benefit of studious
and curious persons. We’re not a national museum, but equally
we’re not a mausoleum; we’ve built up fantastic research
collections and we continue to invest heavily in them with a view to them
actually being utilized. Obviously there are stewardship
responsibilities. We have to address preservation and conservation issues
and that means we must restrict access to certain items. But generally the
collections are there to be used by anybody who has a serious intent and
is capable of actually benefiting from them, so it’s research broadly
defined. Our biggest challenge is the growth of the collection.”