Looking up, the public will be able to see a section of leatherbound volumes wheeled back in order that an assistant may take one out. For some this will be a new experience. Those who have been going in and out of the Science Reference Library without a pass will have to prove their need. Here you do not see, as you do in Bloomsbury, one kind of use passing gently into another, smartness giving way to bohemian gentility. Something more violent is taking place.
Plans are grander and contrasts are greater.
The Salvation Army have their social services headquarters only a few hundred yards from where drug-dealers, drunks, beggars and girls on the game provide opportunities for saving souls and models for any modern Piranesi who seeks to give scale and raffish drama to images of the monuments which lie to the north. I pass this way every morning and evening as I go from the flat where I work to the station. The Library is a new neighbour and I wonder how it will get along with the others on the street. We seem to want to have our buildings and rebuild them too. This can't go on for ever.