London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks. Streets Ahead. Story time. History time.
And here you go. As promised yesterday.
It may be the most famous room in London.
Not the grandest.
Not the oldest. Not the most gilded.
But perhaps the most important.
The Reading Room at the British Museum.
That vast blue and gold dome.
That perfect circle of desks. That hush.
A room built for thought.
A room where ideas that changed the world were born, argued over, scribbled down, torn up, rewritten.
A room where Karl Marx practically lived. Where Dickens came to quarry facts. Where George Eliot researched Romola. Where Thomas Hardy read and brooded. Where George Bernard Shaw sharpened his wit.
Where Lenin sat.
Where H.G. Wells dreamed futures.
Where Bram Stoker nosed around old horrors.
Where Arthur Conan Doyle hunted details.
And if walls could talk, these walls would never stop.
It’s reopened to the public.
And stepping into it now is like stepping into the control room of civilisation.
It sits in the heart of the British Museum like a giant thought bubble.
Perfectly circular.
One hundred and forty feet across.
Rising more than a hundred feet overhead. When it opened in 1857 it was the second largest dome in the world, surpassed only by St Peter’s in Rome.
Not bad for Bloomsbury.
And yes, there’s Rome in this room.
The design was shaped, at least in spirit, by the Pantheon, that ancient Roman marvel, the great dome of domes. Not a copy. But an heir.
The Pantheon was a temple to all gods.
Panizzi’s Reading Room became a temple to all knowledge.
And the man behind it was an Italian.
Antonio Panizzi.
A revolutionary. A fugitive. A man condemned to death back in Modena.
He arrived in England in 1823 penniless, an exile.
And ended up transforming the intellectual life of Britain.
That’s London for you.
Panizzi joined the British Museum in 1831 and looked around at the existing arrangements for readers and thought: this won’t do.
He wanted a proper library.
Not merely a warehouse for books.
He wanted a machine for knowledge.
His great line was magnificent: “The expense will no doubt be great; but so is the nation which is to bear it.”
That’s the spirit.
He fought for money, books, catalogues, staff. Fought trustees, publishers, civil servants, scientists, colleagues.
Mostly he won.
And then he came up with the masterstroke: put the reading room right in the empty quadrangle at the centre of the museum.
A round room.
Books spiralling around it.
Readers at the centre.
Knowledge literally encircling thought.
It was designed by Sydney Smirke, but the vision was Panizzi’s.
And what a room.
The desks radiate like spokes.
The old catalogue desks stood at the centre like an altar.
Above, the dome floats like a sky of its own.
Blue. Gold. Light pouring down.
It feels ecclesiastical.
A church of secular faith.
And people worshipped here.
Charles Dickens was in early.
Very early.
On his eighteenth birthday, the very first day he was eligible, he applied for his reader’s ticket.
That tells you almost everything you need to know about Dickens.
Most eighteen-year-olds are thinking about girls, beer or escape.
Dickens wanted the British Museum.
And then there was Marx.
Desk G7.
Day after day. Year after year.
Mining Blue Books, factory reports, economic statistics.
The raw data of industrial capitalism.
And turning it into Das Kapital.
You can make a strong case that it’s the most influential book written in London.
You can make an even stronger case that it’s the most influential book written anywhere since the Bible.
That one desk in that room helped redraw the map of history.
George Eliot sat here too.
Thomas Hardy.
George Bernard Shaw.
Lenin.
W.B. Yeats.
Rudyard Kipling.
Oscar Wilde.
Mahatma Gandhi.
Virginia Woolf.
A roll call of minds.
If you wanted to make a list of the people who shaped the modern world, you could do worse than start with the reader register.
And Virginia Woolf found the perfect image for it.
She wrote of entering the room and standing beneath that dome “as if one were a thought in the huge bald forehead”.
That’s exactly it.
Panizzi built not just a reading room but a brain.
And every reader who entered it became, for a little while, one of its thoughts.
That’s the genius of it.
Not simply grandeur.
Intensity.
Labour.
Mental labour.
The hard graft of thinking.
And it wasn’t just men.
Women fought to get in too.
Scholars, writers, campaigners, readers.
By the late nineteenth century they were here as well, quietly laying siege to the old order.
That matters.
Because this room was never static.
It evolved.
It opened.
It widened.
And then, in 1997, everything changed.
The books moved to St Pancras.
The scholars with them.
The great engine fell silent.
For a while the room became an exhibition space.
Then it closed.
For eleven years.
Shut.
Silent.
Out of bounds.
But now?
You’re going to like this a lot.
It feels like they’ve opened it up just for us.
All by itself, it’s reason enough to catch our VIP Friday night British Museum tour.
The best possible time to see it, to go in there.
Because by then the daytime crowds have melted away.
The noise has ebbed.
Bloomsbury is settling into evening.
And there it is.
That great blue dome.
That vast calm circle of desks.
Almost empty.
We’ve pretty much got it to ourselves.
Just us and the ghosts.
Magical doesn’t feel too strong a word.
Because this is when you feel it best.
The hush.
The gravity.
The accumulated weight of all that thought.
Dickens at eighteen.
Marx at G7.
Woolf, and indeed each of us, becoming a thought in that great bald forehead.
Panizzi, the exile from Modena.
A Roman idea.
A London room.
And Panizzi?
There’s something wonderfully fitting here.
The Italian exile who dreamed this room into existence spent his final years just around the corner in Bloomsbury Square.
And died there in 1879.
Almost within sight of the dome he created.
A perfect circle.
Rome to London.
Exile to empire.
Idea to stone.
Maybe the most famous room in London.
Certainly one of its greatest.
See you tomorrow.
And who knows, maybe, just maybe, we’ll be in St Jame’s Square tomorrow. In my favourite library in all of London. If like me, you suffer from an incurable case of bibliomania, you best come along for the ride. You’ll like where we’re going.
Anyway, yes, Watch this space.