British Library
A national memory palace: 170-plus million items from Magna Carta to Beatles lyrics, housed in a purpose-built red-brick campus by St Pancras. Anyone can browse the free Treasures Gallery; researchers with a Reader Pass descend to robotic stacks that fetch books like clockwork. Architecture fans get the six-storey King’s Library tower glowing in the atrium. Plan 60–90 minutes for Treasures + piazza + shop; add a half-day if you’re reading in the rooms.
Opening Hours
What's not to miss inside?
Treasures Gallery
A world tour in manuscriptsMagna Carta, Shakespeare’s First Folio, Jane Austen’s notebook, Beatles lyrics on scraps—history in its own handwriting.
📍 Lower ground floor
King’s Library Tower
George III’s books in a glass lighthouse65,000 volumes float behind glass from floor to roof; it’s both sculpture and stack.
📍 Central atrium
Reading Rooms
Silent engines of scholarshipOrder a book and the building goes to work—conveyors and lifts pull it from deep storage to your desk.
📍 Upper floors (Reader Pass required)
Sound Gallery & Events
Where a library listensFrom wax cylinders to radio archives, six million+ recordings widen ‘reading’ to hearing.
📍 Entrance level & programme venues
Piazza Sculptures
Art as wayfindingPaolozzi’s giant ‘Newton’ sits like a guardian; maps and quotes are set into the paving if you look down.
📍 Exterior plaza, Euston Road
Inspire your Friends
- The British Library is one of the world’s largest: 170+ million items and counting, growing by miles of shelves each year through legal deposit.
- St Cuthbert’s Gospel (c. 700) is the oldest intact European book—tiny, red-bound, and astonishingly well-preserved.
- The building was the largest UK public project of the 20th century—designed by Colin St John Wilson, opened fully in 1998 after decades of planning.
- Not all the library is in London: a vast site at Boston Spa in Yorkshire holds millions of items and dispatches them to readers nationwide.
- Those Beatles lyrics? They’re drafts on envelopes and hotel paper—proof that pop history sometimes begins on the nearest scrap.
