British Library Reading Room

British Museum Reading Room
Inside the Reading Room, before its conversion to an exhibition space
General information
Town or city	Bloomsbury, London
Country	United Kingdom
Coordinates	51°31′9.91″N 0°7′37.47″W / 51.5194194°N 0.1270750°W / 51.5194194; -0.1270750Coordinates: 51°31′9.91″N 0°7′37.47″W / 51.5194194°N 0.1270750°W / 51.5194194; -0.1270750
Construction started	1854
Completed	1857
Technical details
Structural system	Segmented domed
Design and construction
Architect	Sydney Smirke

The British Museum Reading Room, situated in the centre of the Great Court of the British Museum, used to be the main reading room of the British Library. In 1997, this function moved to the new British Library building at St Pancras, London, but the Reading Room remains in its original form at the British Museum.

Designed by Sydney Smirke and opened in 1857, the Reading Room was in continual use until its temporary closure for renovation in 1997. It was reopened in 2000, and from 2007 to 2014 it was used to stage temporary exhibitions. It has since been closed while its future use remains under discussion.

In the early 1850s the museum library was in need of a larger reading room and the then-Keeper of Printed Books, Antonio Panizzi, following an earlier competition idea by William Hosking, came up with the thought of a round room in the central courtyard. The building was designed by Sydney Smirke and was constructed between 1854 and 1857. The building used cast iron, concrete, glass and the latest technology in ventilation and heating. The dome, inspired by the Pantheon in Rome, has a diameter of 42.6 metres but is not technically free standing: constructed in segments on cast iron, the ceiling is suspended and made out of papier-mâché. Book stacks built around the reading room were made of iron to take the huge weight and add fire protection. There were forty kilometres of shelving in the stacks prior to the library's relocation to the new site.

The Reading Room was officially opened on 2 May 1857 with a 'breakfast' (that included champagne & ice cream) laid out on the catalogue desks. A public viewing was held between 8 and 16 May which attracted over 62,000 visitors. Tickets to it included a plan of the library.

Regular users had to apply in writing and be issued a reader's ticket by the Principal Librarian. During the period of the British Library, access was restricted to registered researchers only; however, reader's credentials were generally available to anyone who could show that they were a serious researcher. The Reading Room was used by a large number of famous figures, including notably Sun Yat-sen, Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, Friedrich Hayek, Bram Stoker, Mahatma Gandhi, Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, George Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, Vladimir Lenin (using the name Jacob Richter), Virginia Woolf, Arthur Rimbaud, Mohammad Ali Jinnah,H. G. Wells and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.