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:
“Why is it we never get our bad medicine in small doses?”
—Edmund H. North, British screenwriter, and Lewis Gilbert. First Sea Lord (Laurence Naismith)
“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)
“Reading about ethics is about as likely to improve one’s behavior as reading about sports is to make one into an athlete.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“You never saw this room before a show,
Full of lank, shivery, half-drowned birds
In separate coops, having their plumage done.
The smell of the wet feathers in the heat!”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)