The Best Room in London
London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks. Streets Ahead. Story time. History time. July 4th, 2026 time.
So, yes, Happy Birthday, America. But in the way of these things, London Calling has other fish to fry.
Cue: Here’s my confession.
My favourite place in London isn’t a church, a museum, a pub, a square, a theatre, a market or even a street.
It’s a library.
Not just any library.
The London Library.
And July 4th is the day for it.
Because on this day, in 1841, it opened its doors.
And what doors.
It sits there in St James’s Square, discreet as an old family secret, giving almost nothing away.
But step inside and — oh my.
This is the nearest the likes of me is ever going to get to an ancient, ever-so-posh, ever-so-upper-class English gentlemen’s club.
Same hush.
Same old-money atmosphere.
Same leather.
Same polished wood.
Same feeling that civilisation, real civilisation, may yet scrape through.
Except better.
Because instead of retired colonels and claret, it’s books.
Miles and miles of books.
And there’s a splendid wrinkle to how it began.
The prime mover was Thomas Carlyle.
A Scot.
Not one of your upholstered English gentlemen.
Carlyle was a volcanic reader, and the story goes that his Scottish feathers were badly ruffled by the way he was treated at the library of the British Museum.
He felt – not without reason – that the titled classes, the aristocratic swells, got rather better treatment than he did.
Most-favoured-nation treatment, as we’d call it now.
And Carlyle didn’t like it.
Not one bit.
So, in high dudgeon, he began campaigning for something better.
A library for readers.
A library where books could be borrowed.
A library where books could be browsed.
A library where books could be handled.
And bless him, a year later, there it was.
One of London’s greatest institutions, born – as many of the best institutions are – out of irritation.
And Carlyle’s fingerprints are on another literary masterpiece as well.
When Charles Dickens was preparing to write A Tale of Two Cities – one of only two historical novels he ever wrote – he needed to steep himself in the French Revolution.
He turned to Carlyle, whose The French Revolution: A History was the great work on the subject.
Dickens asked if Carlyle could send him a few books.
Some background.
A bit of scene-setting.
Carlyle sent him a cartload.
An avalanche of books from the London Library.
Dickens was astonished by the sheer number of them.
And there’s a lovely coda to that.
At this very moment, on the staircase at the London Library, in one of the display cases, sits the front cover of the first published edition of A Tale of Two Cities.
History talking to history.
And unlike the British Library – here’s the crucial thing – here you can take the books home.
Check them out.
Walk off with them under your arm.
Try doing that at the British Library.
And here’s the even bigger thing.
At the London Library you can go into the stacks.
That’s everything.
Absolutely everything.
If you’ve never known that freedom, let me explain.
Back in my British Library days – when it was still housed in the British Museum – you looked up your book in these enormous leather-bound catalogue volumes.
Great lumbering tomes.
Magnificent things.
Each book listed alphabetically.
You found your entry, copied out the details onto a slip.
Author.
Title.
Shelfmark.
Handed it over.
And then waited.
Forty-five minutes if fortune smiled.
Two hours if it didn’t.
And sometimes a note came back saying your book was down at the Woolwich deposit in southeast London.
Try again tomorrow.
Or the day after.
Because the British Library had more books than it could fit in Bloomsbury.
So there were vans.
Legions of them.
Shuttling books back and forth.
Bloomsbury to Woolwich.
Woolwich to Bloomsbury.
A baler-twine solution.
Gloriously makeshift.
Breathtakingly inefficient.
And it must have cost a pretty penny.
One of the big reasons for moving the British Library to St Pancras was to get the whole collection under one roof.
A noble ambition.
Though, given the rate they acquire books, you suspect even that roof will eventually start to groan.
But here’s the point.
At the London Library, none of that.
You fetch your own books.
You walk the stacks.
And that changes everything.
Because it happens all the time.
You go in looking for one book…
…and come out with six.
That title beside the title you wanted.
That book you’d never heard of.
That absolutely perfect accidental discovery.
That ambush of serendipity.
That happy propinquity.
It cannot happen in a closed-stack library.
By definition.
And then there’s the smell.
Good Lord, the smell.
For a bibliophile it’s heaven.
Warm paper.
Dust.
Leather.
Glue.
Age.
Thought.
It’s the book-lover’s equivalent of sinking into a gloriously hot bubble bath.
Pure bliss.
And then there’s the main reading room.
Wonderful.
Huge windows looking out over beautiful St James’s Square.
Big leather-covered armchairs.
Soft carpets underfoot.
Soft carpets on the stairs.
A room so civilised it makes you want to improve yourself.
And if you nod off in one of those chairs?
They won’t wake you.
Not unless you’re snoring like a traction engine.
That, my friends, is civilisation.
On the staircase the walls are lined with photographs of the great and the good.
Leslie Stephen.
Virginia Woolf.
H. G. Wells.
Rudyard Kipling.
Vanessa Bell.
Everybody who was anybody.
And sometimes — deliciously — you bump into the living tribe as well.
Years ago I met A. J. P. Taylor in the stacks.
I’ve seen Paul Theroux there.
Helena Bonham Carter.
And others.
Writers.
Thinkers.
Readers.
The faithful.
It’s private.
Members only.
Subscription.
Costs me several hundred pounds a year.
Worth every penny.
No hesitation.
No qualification.
My favourite place in London.
Favourite favourite place.
The quintessence of civilised bibliophiledom.
A sanctuary.
A clubhouse.
A warren.
A time machine.
A refuge.
A home for people who believe that somewhere, among all those shelves, there is always one more book waiting to change your life.