History
The library was designed by Henry Holtom of Dewsbury in the Italian classical style and opened in 1887 by the former and future Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone. The circular reference library, 86 feet (26 m) in diameter, has a domed top, 25 feet (7.6 m) feet high in the centre. The collections provided a repository of source material for research on Swansea in particular and Wales in general. The Dylan Thomas Collection, established in the early 1950s, consisted of over 3,000 books and periodical articles written by, or about, the Swansea-born poet and author.
The library was closed in November 2007. After its closure, the interior of the library building, including the domed reading room, was used extensively by BBC Wales as a location for the Doctor Who episodes "Silence in the Library" and "Forest of the Dead". The new Swansea Central Library, opened in March 2008, is located in the Civic Centre alongside the West Glamorgan Archives Service.
Read more about this topic: Old Swansea Central Library
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The myth of independence from the mother is abandoned in mid- life as women learn new routes around the mother—both the mother without and the mother within. A mid-life daughter may reengage with a mother or put new controls on care and set limits to love. But whatever she does, her child’s history is never finished.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)
“The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite!
There are only two great currents in the history of mankind: the baseness which makes conservatives and the envy which makes revolutionaries.”
—Edmond De Goncourt (1822–1896)
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)