The British Museum is an all-encompassing treasure house that has collected art and artefacts since its inception in 1753. It has eight million individual items from all over the world but the one experience that always takes my breath away is the light, spacious, uncompromisingly modern space that is the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, opened by Her Majesty in December 2000.
The Museum’s acquisitiveness has repeatedly overstuffed its premises and sections of the collections have been hived off to create other celebrated London museums and galleries – the National Gallery (1824), the Natural History Museum (1881) and the British Library at St Pancras (1997).
When the late seventeenth-century Old Montagu House, its original home, could take no more contents the architect Sir Robert Smirke (1780-1867) designed a neoclassical structure around a quadrangle, which was constructed between 1823 and 1852.
For its day, it was an ideal base for a national museum with a worldwide collection, but as the inexorable pressure of acquisitions mounted, the central courtyard would sooner or later have to be sacrificed.
In particular, King George IV’s 1823 donation of most of his father George III’s library, added to his grandfather George II’s original 1757 bequest of his Old Royal Library, came with Parliamentary confirmation that the British Museum should act as a legal deposit library, entitled to a copy of every book published in the country. That’s a lot of books.
After thirty years, Sir Robert Smirke’s younger brother, Sydney Smirke (1797-1877), was commissioned to create the Round Reading Room (1854-57) in the courtyard, and the spaces between his circular bookshelves and the inner walls of his brother’s buildings were filled with three storeys of iron bookstacks which eventually extended to twenty-five miles of shelving. There were table spaces for 302 readers at a time.
This celebrated, much-loved space was the birthplace of the works of a pantheon of writers, from Karl Marx to Mahatma Ghandi, Rudyard Kipling to Virginia Woolf. Vladimir Lenin signed in under the name Jacob Richter, as if he’d got something to hide.
Indeed the Reading Room dome recalls the Pantheon in Rome, though it’s actually a couple of feet smaller (140 feet). Its ceiling is made of papier-mâché suspended from the structural cast-iron shell.
The British Museum’s library collections were transferred in 1997 to the new British Library at St Pancras, designed by Colin St John Wilson (1922-2007) and his wife M J Long (1939-2008), leaving the Reading Room without a purpose.
The architects Foster & Partners developed a 1970s scheme by Colin St John Wilson to clear the surrounding clutter of stacks and other structures to create a circulation space serving the entire site.
This required ingenuity, because the Reading Room didn’t have walls: the bookshelves that readers knew actually backed on to the stacks.
A plain white wall now embraces Sydney Smirke’s great study space, which has been restored and was used first for exhibitions and later as the home of the Museum’s archive.
Brief public tours of the Reading Room have been restarted. Pre-booking is required and photography is not allowed: Visit | British Museum.
The pièce de resistance, a triumph of late twentieth-century architecture and engineering, is the tessellated glass roof of the Great Court, designed and fabricated by the Austrian manufacturer Waagner-Biro, which had completed the Reichstag Dome in Berlin in 1999.
The Great Court is light, airy and relaxing, with space to sit down and enjoy refreshments from the café.
It’s London’s answer to I M Pei’s Louvre Pyramid.