The British Library is now up and running, but 25 years ago, despite years of planning and £450 million of public funds it was plagued by controversy. Brian Lake reports
The British Library, with its famous Round Reading Room, was once renowned internationally as a centre of excellence. Today, with its new building moving to completion way behind schedule and reduced to half the originally projected size, the Library has become a political football, its management and the politicians responsible trying merely to limit the damage.
Where in the past librarians with faith in their institution would have fought for the principles on which the Library was founded, now there are political placemen and marketing executives concerned with mollifying politicians and implementing cuts rather than fighting them.
Established by Act of Parliament in 1757 as part of the British Museum, it is still affectionately known as the British Museum Library. During the 19th century and even into the 20th, books and manuscripts, rather than artefacts, were central to the national repository of culture. In the 1850s this dominance was given physical reality by the creation of Sir Anthony Panizzi’s great Round Reading Room at the heart of the museum, rather than the Central Hall for Antiquities promoted by Sir Charles Barry. In 1909 Richard Garnett wrote: ‘The world contains no edifice more carefully devised down to the minutest details, or better adapted to subserve the double purpose of storage for immense contents and accommodation for a numerous public.’ To join the ranks of the 60,000 readers who can use this place still costs not a penny; but you must be over 21 and provide an academic reference testifying to your worthiness to use the library of last resort.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the Library’s holdings approached 18 million items, and outhouses throughout London were holding the substantial overspill from Bloomsbury. Plans were laid for a separation of the Library from the Museum and, when a site in Bloomsbury was ruled out, the redundant goods yard next to St Pancras was chosen to be the site of the new BL.
It has been 25 years in the planning and building and it is still not completed. It has been going for so long, in fact, that there has been rather too much time for many people to realize how things might have been better accomplished. No one now, for instance, would accept a plan for a new British Library without incorporating the continued use of the Bloomsbury Round Reading Room. But because St Pancras has cost so much and has to be justified, it is dismissed as outmoded and redundant.
An independent British Library was not in itself a bad idea. The original plan to demolish Bloomsbury between Great Russell Street and New Oxford Street was halted by conservationists when the Government should perhaps have over-ridden such parochialism in favour of a grand national project. Organizationally separated in 1972, with plans for a move to St Pancras agreed for 1975, the central part of the Library still remains locked within the same building as the Museum.
The idea of building at St Pancras was, again, not in itself a bad one. With Mrs Thatcher’s backing and £60 million of public funding came the promise of a national library that would ‘unite the collections under one roof (instead of 18 outhouses) and be large enough to store those collections up to the year 2030. New technology would be employed to fuel the information revolution. The Round Reading Room would be lost to readers, but the proposals seemed attractive enough to restrict protests to a few lonely voices.
But over the last ten years things have changed dramatically — from Thatcher’s monument to Thatcher’s folly, from £60 million fully completed to £450 million half completed, from housing all the books under one roof until 2030 to being full before it is even opened. The lone voices of protest have swelled to quite a chorus.
As the dream began to fall apart, in 1987 the historian Hugh Thomas persuaded some 100 of the great and the good to support a compromise scheme for developing St Pancras as far as it would be allowed to go, whilst combining the new buildings with the existing Reading Room, a mere half mile away and connected by an underground railway. The Jefferson Library in Washington was being updated with modern technology. Why not the Round Reading Room on which the Jefferson was modelled? The plan did not even receive a reply from government minister Richard Luce and the race to get shot of the scheme as soon as possible got under way.
As it turned out, while diversionary tacticians such as Lord Thomas could be ignored, other hurdles proved to be very large indeed — and the finishing-post continues to move further away.
The biggest hurdle has been finance. Costs have risen out of control, and as Patrick Jenkin, former Environment Minister, admitted in a House of Lords debate late last year, no one is clearly in charge of the project. The Treasury, Environment and Arts Ministries are all involved, but none dominantly so. With the much criticized Property Services Agency in day-to-day charge of the building work together with the contractors John Laing, and the British Library management hopping around on the sidelines, the site has become a victim of lax supervision and spiralling costs.
The Conservative government finally called a halt in 1990; £450 million was declared the ceiling and the Library would only be half finished. Books would start to be moved in the summer of 1991 and the Queen would officially open the new Reading Room in November 1993 after it had opened earlier that year. If books had to be stored in Yorkshire (Boston Spa, the BL’s Northern Lending Division), so be it. It was a pity that there would only be a handful more seats than at present, but it couldn’t be helped. The rest of the St Pancras site could be sold off — which would also have the useful effect of stifling future demands for expansion. The Round Reading Room would remain at the British Museum — with no funds for renovation.
This quick-fix approach to getting rid of the voracious St Pancras baby that gets alarmingly smaller and uglier has not worked well. With additional government cutbacks in funding for books and the diversion of money and staff to organize the move, even the compliant BL management has become restless.
The initial timetable for moving millions of books to St Pancras had to be put back six months to December 1991 because of problems with the new mobile shelving. There was much chortling in the press when it was discovered that the moving shelves were throwing books about. These mobile shelving units were installed to maximize storage, but tests revealed that shelf movement resulted in the ‘whipping, vibration and jolting’ of books. This would mean slow long-term damage and the destruction of falling books — which could also jam the shelf units.
Last autumn the project director reported that ‘it has now become clear that substantial remedial works are required.’ There were worries about design shortcomings and inferior paintwork leading to rusting on 180 miles of shelving. Lawyers were consulted and negotiations got under way with the manufacturers Bruynzeel Storage Systems Ltd in January this year. On 21 January Brian Lang, BL’s chief executive, announced to staff that the revised timetable for moving to St Pancras was to be abandoned. ‘I simply cannot say with any certainty what this means as to opening dates . . . We must not sacrifice quality in order to move into the building earlier than is sensible.’
That remains the current position. Tim Renton, the Minister for Arts and Libraries, has shown confidence in the willingness of Electrolux, Bruynzeel’s parent company, to overcome the problems even if Bruynzeel itself were to come under severe financial pressure as a result of all the shelving having to be removed and repaired. Although the defective paintwork is supposed to be the main current worry, further testing has shown that earlier design faults have not been cured. It is difficult to see how this particular mess can be resolved. With other building work falling behind schedule the 1993-6 transition phase (when Bloomsbury and St Pancras will both be open) is likely to stretch towards the year 2000.
But if the building is a bit small and a bit late, what is the nation getting for its £450 million meanwhile? The grand entrance, rather like a portico on a suburban semi, promises much and delivers little. The visitor doesn’t quite fall down the other side after reaching the top of the stairs, but it feels like that. If the shelves can be made to work, the Library will hold 11 million volumes — and there will be no room for the tens of thousands that are added every year which will have to go to Yorkshire. The new building adds a mere 73 seats for readers above the present 1,103, rather than the promised 3,440. It is an addition which will look even more feeble when undergraduates, allowed in for the first time, swell demand. The Rare Book Reading Room, far from being the focal point of the building, is an L-shaped afterthought. Staff facilities, meant to be an improvement on the ‘squalor’ of Bloomsbury, are mean, dark and crowded.
Kenneth Cooper, the BL chief executive who retired in 1991, left as his legacy the description of St Pancras as ‘second-rate’ because of government parsimony. Brian Lang stepped into his shoes after stints at the Historic Buildings Council for Scotland, National Heritage and the National Trust. Much has been made of his academic background as an anthropologist, but it was his marketing skills that got him the BL job. The name of the game is no longer books, but book-keeping — turning a profit on the assets, using commercial sponsorship, corporate membership, mail- shot appeals for donations from readers, inadvisedly described by Lang as ‘our warm audience’. Such talk may leave them cold, as sponsor-a-book appeals by Roland Rat and Jeffrey Archer have done in the past.
However, Dr Lang has raised his voice in favour of more government funding — which has added to the friction with BL chairman, Commander Michael Saunders Watson of Rockingham Castle, pheasant shooting companion of Tim Renton and friend of Kenneth Baker. Saunders Watson also arrived in 1991 and there were high hopes among staff and readers that reviews would be initiated. But no such luck. If Labour wins the election, Watson, who has won few friends with his style of chairmanship, will no doubt be resigning, while Lang will be given his head, coming as he does with glowing testimonials from Scottish Labour Party bosses such as Donald Dewar. If the Tories win, Dr Lang may be the man on his way out.
Third of the uncomfortable Library triumvirate is Michael Smethurst, in charge of London operations and the Big Move. Short-tempered and heavy-smoking, Smethurst treats anyone with variant views on the Library as slightly unhinged. But at least he is not a PR man; in discussion he has a knack of helping to reinforce the point of view with which you started out.
Tim Renton has a reputation for avoiding these problems and spending as little as possible on doing as little as possible. Every enquiry to him is fobbed off, passed on, referred back. Renton’s shadow, Mark Fisher, is a much more impressive character who has a clear picture of what needs to be done at the Library. Fisher shows no enthusiasm for retaining the Round Reading Room but is prepared to consider keeping it for longer while plans for expansion at the St Pancras site are reinstated and realized. Where Saunders Watson and the Conservatives are looking to charge readers, Lang and Labour are against it.
But if there is no place for a room so superbly functional and inspirational, working as well today as it did when it first opened, what will happen to it? David Wilson, outgoing director of the British Museum, wrote to The Times in August 1991: ‘The trustees of the Museum have made many statements to the effect that the Round Reading Room will continue to be used for reading purposes. They have not deviated from that intention.’ But if the Room is to remain as a library, it can hardly have visitors wandering through it. And if they cannot do that, the Room is not much use to the Museum, because it will remain an inaccessible area slap-bang in the middle, forcing all visitors round it, as it does now. Mark Fisher has given strong hints that the library commitments of David Wilson will be quickly forgotten if the Round Reading Room is opened up for public circulation as an ‘atrium’. At least the Conservatives have given public support for retaining its use as a library via Lord Astor, spokesman for the Arts in the House of Lords, who has promised the ‘possibility of a limited service in the Round Reading Room ’ after 1996.
Even so, Labour’s commitment to a full review and more funding must be a better bet than the present policy. Anything that might restore the vision of a great Library, rather than scrabbling around in the gutter to raise pennies by selling the services of the bindery or publishing worthless tomes on the British Library’s Greatest Hits; anything to keep in use the best reading room in the world and save it from helping to sell McDonald’s hamburgers, or from being a set for Lovejoy to whisper, ‘the vibes in here are incredible.’
1992
