Sitting in the centre of the British Museum is a huge Round Reading Room, with a massive dome, and although long closed to the public, the museum has started offering tours.
(c) British Museum
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 put a temporary floor in to use the space for exhibitions in 2007, but that stopped in 2013 and is now used to house the museum’s archive. Sadly, that means the room has been pretty much off limits to visitors for the past decade.
Until now…
The museum is starting to offer short tours of the room that lets you go inside for the first time in a decade and see the magnificent dome and the space where some of the most famous (infamous?) writers studied. Such as Karl Marx, Lenin (who signed in under the name Jacob Richter) and novelists such as Bram Stoker and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
The tours are free, and need to be booked in advance from here.
The tours take place on Tuesdays and start at 11.30am, lasting 20 minutes. Meet at the information desk.
New tour dates will be released monthly – and March tickets are on sale at the moment, but if March is sold out, put a note in your diary for 7th March as that’s when the April tickets will be released.
Photography is not permitted in the Round Reading Room.
(You used to be able to look down into the Reading Room from the Great Court restaurant, but they blocked off the windows for the exhibitions and they’ve been blocked off ever since, which apart from stopping people from seeing inside the reading room, killed off the “secret perk” for getting tables next to the windows for the amazing view.)
after the British Library moved but before they decided to use it as an exhibition space, for a time it reverted to being a library. It was a great place to sit, pull a book from the shelves and read or if you were a student at UCL find yourself a space to work. The shelves were partially filled, if I remember rightly with donated books from the personal library of one of the trustees, I remember pulling a book from the shelves on early Chinese art, being amazed at some Han dynasty paintings, but time was pressing and I never finished the book, next time I said to myself, but there was no next time. Its a real shame that they couldn’t have continued using the library as a library; but I guess having a space that they could use as a revenue earning exhibition space seemed more attractive.