The British Museum’s famous Reading Room has reopened
Quietly and without fanfare, the British Museum has reopened its world-famous reading room, and anyone can now visit it for free.
It was announced yesterday that the reading room would reopen for tours, and while those will be held once a week, the room has also opened to general visitors to wander in as they please.
The Reading Room was built for the British Library when it occupied the space, but when the library decamped to St Pancras and the courtyard cleared of books to create the indoor space it is today – the library reading room was also opened to the general public for only the second time in its history.
The museum later put a temporary floor in to use the space for exhibitions in 2007, but that stopped in 2013, and the doors have generally been closed since then.
However, this morning, the stone wall that’s stood in front of the reading room door for the past decade was removed, and the locked doors were quietly opened to let the public pass through once again.
There’s a strict, and strictly enforced, No Photos rule and about a quadrant of the room has been opened for people to wander in and gawp at the magnificent domed ceiling. There are some explanatory boards in the room, and you can see the reading desks where people have sat studying anything from a new novel to a world-changing political polemic.
However, really, it’s a chance that few have had for the past decade, and that is to see inside this famous room and admire the architecture. And maybe soak up a little bit of the literary legacy that lingers in the atmosphere.
The Reading Room is now open daily when the British Museum is open, and from Tuesday 23rd July 2024, there will be free 20-minute tours every Tuesday at 11am and 12pm.
How amazing!
How odd, you mean! Genuinely. I am on the BM’s (e)mailing list but there’s been nothing about it; I also liaised with their press office a few years back when I wrote my piece about the museum’s problems and what its forthcoming plan might usefully cover (https://www.chrismrogers.net/post/what-s-british-about-the-british-museum) and asked specifically about the reading room. Very strange. Meanwhile the basement displays remain inaccessible…
Nice to see it (partially) open again, but a shame it’s not operating as a library, and doesn’t look likely to again. For several years after they opened up the redeveloped Great Court to the public, it was the site of the Paul Hamlyn Library. The whole ground floor space was open, and anyone could sit at one of those desks and consult a large collection of books relevant to the museum, or explore the collection virtually on a computer. They used the Terracotta Army exhibition as an excuse to board it up and the books were shunted off to another room that was also eventually closed. Now the few desks that are within touching distance of visitors have ‘don’t touch’ signs. Apparently there’s going to be some further (unspecified) transformation of the space in the future. They weren’t enforcing any ‘no photos’ rule when I was there today – everyone was taking selfies.