London’s top attractions - The British Library

If you're around the Kings Cross area and have some free time one place its definitely worth having a look at is the British Library in its new building next to St Pancras station.

The British Library houses the national collection of books, manuscripts and maps and the national sound archive. It used to be part of the British Museum and split off to become the British Library in the 1970s, the present building was only opened in 1997.

It’s located on the Euston Road, if you come out of Kings Cross station and go right you’ll see a big red bricked Gothic style building with spires that looks a bit like a cathedral, this is St Pancras station and just past that on the right is the British Library. The new building is less than ten years old and to be honest reminds me of one of those mega Tesco style supermarkets, but it looks a lot better on the inside.

The British Museum started keeping published material in 1753 and its collections were available to the public in its famous circular Reading Room where people such as Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, Lenin, Ghandi and a lot more famous names used their materials over the years. The public has access to the archives of the British Library but you need to go to there and fill in a Reader Registration form to get a Reader Pass, basically just to prove who you are before handling any of their books.

By law the British Library must keep a copy of every publication produced in Britain and Ireland, and they currently have over 150 million items and add around 3 million more every year. There’s a separate building at Colindale that houses their newspaper collection, including the first copy of The Times from 1788.

When you walk into the British Library building its light and spacious, there’s a long information desk in front of you and behind that up a few steps are a temporary exhibition space, a cafe and toilet facilities, and escalators and stairs to the collections.
For the casual visitor who’s not going to get a Reader Pass to do some research, the place to head to is the Sir John Ritblat Gallery and the exhibition area next to it. Once you enter the building turn left towards the bookshop and to the right of that you’ll see the sign for the galleries.

The Ritblat Gallery displays the most famous and priceless items in the British Library collection including the Magna Carta, some of the earliest written and printed copies of the Bible, the Koran, the Jewish Torah, and Hindu and Buddhist texts, Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook, papers and writings by Shakespeare, Galileo and Sir Issac Newton. They have original scores and manuscripts by Mozart, Beethoven, Handel and other composers, as well some of the original handwritten lyrics to Beatles songs.

You can also see Captain Cook’s journal from 1775, Lenin’s application for a reader pass to the British Museum, Captain Scott’s diary showing the final entry from his fatal expedition to the South Pole and a lot more famous historical documents.

Down some steps outside the Ritblat Gallery is a large temporary exhibition space where they currently have a show called London:A Life In Maps which uses maps from their collection to tell the story of London’s developement from Roman times to the present. There maps of all kinds here, some very large and its interesting comparing the sprawling London of today with no space for miles, with how it looked only a 150-200 years ago when the dense urban areas were fields and villages.

London:A Life In Maps is free to enter like the rest of the British Library and is running until the 4 March 2007.
The British Library is open daily throughout the year, closed 24-28 December and 1 January. It open from 9.30am(11am Sun) and has varied closing times through the week.
It’s a two minute walk from Kings Cross station.