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)
“No one to slap his head.”
—Hawaiian saying no. 190, ‘lelo No’Eau, collected, translated, and annotated by Mary Kawena Pukui, Bishop Museum Press, Hawaii (1983)
“Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant? We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology!—I know of no reading of another’s experience so startling and informing as this would be.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The distance between your place in the kitchen and Miss Vollard’s place in the dining room is considerable.”
—Blake Edwards (b. 1922)