page_title: British Museum Reading Room
section_title: The British Museum Library
hierarchical_section_title: British Museum Reading Room / History / The British Museum Library
caption_attribution_description: English: The Reading Room at the British Museum Generations of researchers, writers, thinkers and students sat at these leather-covered desks to use the incomparable facilities of the British Library, from 1857 until 1997 when the books were moved to the new premises in Euston Road. The Reading Room remains available as a public resource with reference books on the open shelves and terminals for online research. Listed on the wall are the names of many of the most celebrated library-users - from anarchists to zoologists.
context_page_description: 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 at the British Museum.
  Designed by Sydney Smirke and opened in 1857, the Reading Room was in continual use until its temporary closure for renovation in 1997. It was reopened in 2000, and from 2007 to 2017 it was used to stage temporary exhibitions. It has since been closed while its future use remains under discussion.
context_section_description: The Reading Room was officially opened on 2 May 1857 with a 'breakfast' (that included champagne and ice cream) laid out on the catalogue desks. A public viewing was held between 8 and 16 May, attracting over 62,000 visitors. Tickets to it included a plan of the library.
  Regular users had to apply in writing and be issued a reader's ticket by the Principal Librarian. During the period of the British Library, access was restricted to registered researchers only; however, reader's credentials were generally available to anyone who could show that they were a serious researcher. The Reading Room was used by a large number of famous figures, including notably Sun Yat-sen, Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, Friedrich Hayek, Marcus Garvey, Bram Stoker, Mahatma Gandhi, Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, George Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, Vladimir Lenin (using the name Jacob Richter),  Virginia Woolf, Arthur Rimbaud, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, H. G. Wells and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
  In 1973, the British Library Act 1972 detached the library department from the British Museum, but it continued to host the now separated British Library in the same Reading Room and building as the museum until 1997.
caption: The reading desks
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