In a crowded country that is short of public money, any expansive public building that seems underused in any way is vulnerable. Professional critics of state spending can claim taxpayers’ money is being wasted. Managers of the building who are under financial pressure can argue it needs to be used more intensely, perhaps that some spaces should be commercialised and offered for rent. The original open, uncommodified, egalitarian quality of the building can be steadily sliced away.
The British Library in London is in danger of that fate. A huge brick battleship moored on the Euston Road since 1997, it claims to be the largest public building constructed in the UK in the 20th century. Its both forbidding and exhilarating exterior conceals 11 unusually elegant and comfortable reading rooms and one of the world’s most extensive print and digital collections, free to use for anyone who is over 18. Last week, these readers received an email with the subject line, “Transforming your Library”. Next summer, the library would “begin work on repurposing our [three] Science and Social Sciences Reading Rooms to become a flexible workspace … available for hire by workers and businesses for co-working, collaboration and meetings”. The reason given for removing more than a quarter of the library’s much-loved research space was “ensuring we generate the necessary revenue to keep our core services free”.
The library has a current annual budget of about £170m – a third the size of my local London hospital’s – 84% of which comes from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. The rest is from donations, investments and “charitable and other trading activities”, such as the private parties and ticketed exhibitions already frequently held in the sweeping interior connecting its reading rooms. Even with these multiple income streams, the library’s financial reserves are perilously low – according to its latest accounts – thanks to inflation and austerity, which mean its state funding has in real terms declined to two-thirds of what it was in 2010, and also a devastating cyber-attack in 2023, from which the library has still not fully recovered.
Despite this troubled context, and in some ways because of it, the library’s drastic reading room reduction plan has provoked “outrage” from staff, say the Prospect and Public and Commercial Services (PCS) unions that represent them. Reading room staff understandably fear for their jobs, but also for the building’s fundamental purpose, which was set out by law in 1972 – an indication of how hard the complex was to conceive and build – as “the establishment for the United Kingdom of a national library”. Staff are now “the most furious I’ve ever seen them about anything”, says a union source. A strike over the reading room plan, following one last year over low pay, could begin as soon as December.
Behind this potentially explosive dispute – not least because many well-connected authors, academics and journalists use the library – lurks a big question. In a digital age of decentralised study and dispersed online resources, what is a national library for?
During the quarter of a century I’ve been regularly using the library, usually the reading rooms that are now under threat, its hierarchy has been trying to answer that existential question by steadily, not always harmoniously, widening the building’s user base and functions. Reading room passes have been transformed from a rationed credential for a few thousand people with supposedly serious research intentions – though some always ended up snoring at their desks – to something provided in minutes to everyone from elderly amateur family historians to undergraduates, particularly when dissertation deadlines pile up in early summer.
Meanwhile, the library’s lobbies, landings, hallways and outdoor terraces have been lined with hundreds of chairs and tables and turned into study areas, meeting places, cafes and locations for loud laptop video conversations. These are all heavily used: a sign of good, free spaces lacking elsewhere. A “family station” inside the entrance offers play materials, art supplies and reading corners for young children. What Karl Marx, who researched for years in the reading room of the British Museum, precursor to the British Library, would have made of the latter’s invitation this Halloween to “pop in for spooky crafts” and “enjoy a fang-tastic time” is an intriguing question.
I generally like the contrast between the library’s studious and boisterous sides: an antidote to the solitary obsessiveness of research and writing. But there are also tensions between the library’s diverging uses, which its management prefers not to acknowledge – and which the proposed changes would almost certainly worsen. Modern life is noisy, especially in London, and the semi-silence of the long, wood-lined reading rooms, with pages softly turning, keyboards pattering, books being slid on and off shelves, and the odd murmured conversation, is precious and addictive, as the constant influx of new young readers makes obvious. First thing in the morning and last thing in the evening, the rooms are half empty. That will probably be used to argue that fewer are needed. But a half-empty place can be an aid to crucial thinking and concentration. And if the reading rooms become fewer and therefore fuller, then users from outside London, whose taxes also pay for this national library, are less likely to be able to get there in time to grab a desk. In the busiest periods, they already sometimes run out.
The library is straining to cope with its daily crowds. On bad mornings, the entrance queue lasts over half an hour. The toilets are increasingly often out of order. The free lockers are wearing out, partly because of use by travellers from the many stations nearby. And across the reading rooms, a mysterious hissing has been spreading for months, like a kettle that never boils. The library says it is coming from a failing pneumatic ventilation system, and “there is no quick solution”. The library is starting to get old.
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In 2032, a towering extension, blander than the original building, is due to open. It is already noisily under construction. Last year, Rebecca Lawrence, then the library’s chief executive, who resigned during the strike, said the extension would “open up the Library even further … [for] future generations of visitors, learners, researchers and budding entrepreneurs”. It will not contain new reading rooms. If you find that ominous, you are not alone.
