$275M building planned for Britain’s National Library

Press, 26 June 1978, Page 14

$275M building planned for Britain’s National Library

London Britain’s National Library is moving house to make way for more books, and scholars feel a twinge of nostalgia. They are glad to get a handsome new headquarters but sad to quit their soot-caked premises in London’s Bloomsbury, a building of colonnaded arches, spacious reading room; a place of world renown and rarefied atmosphere dear to generations of academics. Here Karl Marx hatched an ideology that changed

history. Here reposes Magna Carta, key document in the evolution of British liberties, and here Hume, Gibbon, Swinburne, Carlyle, Thackeray and George Bernard Shaw nourished their muse. Now, shortage of space and the need for improved services are forcing what is often called the world’s greatest . library to move its 10M volumes from its present home in the British Museum and 16 other places in and around London. They are destined for a brand new structure still on the drawing board, a 5275 M building of reddish brick and bronze trim beside St Pancras railway station in central London. Lord Eccles, a former British Government Minis-

ter and chairman of a 14member board which runs the National Library, predicted that the new structure, due for completion in 20 years, would give London one of the few outstanding buildings built I in Britain this century. I Work will start next year, i “In 10 or 20 years we i will have easily the best library in Europe and very possibly in the world,” Lord Eccles said. Some critics demurred. They said that the new structure would cost ultimately as much as the Anglo-French Concorde airliner, making it another example of what they called a British weakness for grandiose projects. | All that was really | needed, these critics i added, was a storehouse I for surplus books linked | with the library by under- : ground railway. ■ “I’m sorry to see the j change,” said the author ’ and historian, Hugh i Thomas. “We are going to lose ■ something special. I think ■ most people find atmosphere and character are ‘ crucial factors in the qualI ity of research, j “The fact is,” said I Thomas, “that the present I library is one of the most j inspiring in the world. ‘I say this as one who | has worked in libraries in Madrid, Geneva. New York, Washington and Paris. I think that the Library of Congress. in ■ Washington, is based on i London’s.” What bookworms may miss most, library staff agreed, is the special at- , traction of the blue and ■ i gold reading-room linked ' I with the name of Italy’s i Ontonio (later Sir Antho- i ny) Panizzi, a refugee i ■ from the tiny Duchy of 1 ; Modena in northern Italy. J He has been described I as the greatest adminis- i trative librarian who ever ; j lived. Panizzi arrived in Britain in 1823. penniless and ’ speaking scarcely any j English. He transformed the library from what the scientist. Sir Humphrey . Davy, called an “ancient, ' misapplied and almost 1 useless museum” into one > lof Britain's great in- i

Curator for many years and soon more English than the English, Panizzi is linked in memory with the lofty dome of the reading room, one of the library’s most striking features. Under Panizzi’s dome, librarians say, the noise of people moving between desks or turning pages is somehow diffused, leaving an impression of quiet animation. John Laurence Wood, recently retired after serving for 40 years, many of them as the library’s keeper of printed books, has mixed feelings about moving. “One grows to love this rabbit warren” he said. “It is not easy to explain why. It’s something about the spacious setting, the

accumulation of historical associations, the atmosphere and sense of dedication.” But, he added: “I have to agree that we really need a building of practical design in which you can get easily from one point to another. And we need more space — already 40 per cent of our 10M volumes are outside the main building.” Apart from books, room must be found for millions of documents ranging from railway timetables, Victorian-era playbills, telephone directories, French revolutionary tracts, catalogues and 18th-century newspapers. Since the early 18th century it has been obligatory for every publisher in Britain to deposit in the library one copy of every book, periodical and newspaper printed. Works come from nearly every country in the world. Requests for material, handled through the library’s Yorkshire division, totalled 2.5 M in 1976, 12 per cent from overseas. The new building will have 3500 seats for readers compared with 800 now, and will unite under one roof ail but one of the other IJ6 library buildings scattered in the London area. In summer the seats are. usually taken before noon. Pressure for tickets is keen. A visitor probing the library’s maze of corridors is baffled by the complexity' of the task of countless volumes.

By

ALAN HARVEY,

NZPA-Reuter

correspondent