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 inside the new British Museum. Designed by Sydney Smirke on a suggestion by the Library's Chief Librarian Anthony Panizzi, following an earlier competition idea by William Hosking, the Reading Room was in continual use from 1857 until its temporary closure in 1997.
Read more about British Museum Reading Room: Construction and Design, Famous Readers, Current Use, References in Art and Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the words british, museum, reading and/or room:
“When a man wants to write a book full of unassailable facts, he always goes to the British Museum.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)
“I have no connections here; only gusty collisions,
rootless seedlings forced into bloom, that collapse.
...
I am the Visiting Poet: a real unicorn,
a wind-up plush dodo, a wax museum of the Movement.
People want to push the buttons and see me glow.”
—Marge Piercy (b. 1936)
“Any reading not of a vicious species must be a good substitute for the amusements too apt to fill up the leisure of the labouring classes.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)
“O reason, reason, abstract phantom of the waking state, I had already expelled you from my dreams, now I have reached a point where those dreams are about to become fused with apparent realities: now there is only room here for myself.”
—Louis Aragon (1897–1982)