If British Library reading rooms become ‘co-working spaces’, what, exactly, is a national library for?; The Guardian, October 29, 2026

 Andy Beckett , The Guardian; If British Library reading rooms become ‘co-working spaces’, what, exactly, is a national library for?

"In a crowded country that is short of public money, any expansive public building that seems underused in any way is vulnerable. Professional critics of state spending can claim taxpayers’ money is being wasted. Managers of the building who are under financial pressure can argue it needs to be used more intensely, perhaps that some spaces should be commercialised and offered for rent. The original open, uncommodified, egalitarian quality of the building can be steadily sliced away.

The British Library in London is in danger of that fate. A huge brick battleship moored on the Euston Road since 1997, it claims to be the largest public building constructed in the UK in the 20th century. Its both forbidding and exhilarating exterior conceals 11 unusually elegant and comfortable reading rooms and one of the world’s most extensive print and digital collections, free to use for anyone who is over 18. Last week, these readers received an email with the subject line, “Transforming your Library”. Next summer, the library would “begin work on repurposing our [three] Science and Social Sciences Reading Rooms to become a flexible workspace … available for hire by workers and businesses for co-working, collaboration and meetings”. The reason given for removing more than a quarter of the library’s much-loved research space was “ensuring we generate the necessary revenue to keep our core services free”.

The library has a current annual budget of about £170m – a third the size of my local London hospital’s – 84% of which comes from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. The rest is from donations, investments and “charitable and other trading activities”, such as the private parties and ticketed exhibitions already frequently held in the sweeping interior connecting its reading rooms. Even with these multiple income streams, the library’s financial reserves are perilously low – according to its latest accounts – thanks to inflation and austerity, which mean its state funding has in real terms declined to two-thirds of what it was in 2010, and also a devastating cyber-attack in 2023, from which the library has still not fully recovered.

Despite this troubled context, and in some ways because of it, the library’s drastic reading room reduction plan has provoked “outrage” from staff, say the Prospect and Public and Commercial Services (PCS) unions that represent them. Reading room staff understandably fear for their jobs, but also for the building’s fundamental purpose, which was set out by law in 1972 – an indication of how hard the complex was to conceive and build – as “the establishment for the United Kingdom of a national library”. Staff are now “the most furious I’ve ever seen them about anything”, says a union source. A strike over the reading room plan, following one last year over low pay, could begin as soon as December.

Behind this potentially explosive dispute – not least because many well-connected authors, academics and journalists use the library – lurks a big question. In a digital age of decentralised study and dispersed online resources, what is a national library for?"

British Library to reinstate Oscar Wilde’s reader card 130 years after it was revoked' The Guardian, June 13, 2025

 Dalya Alberge, The Guardian; British Library to reinstate Oscar Wilde’s reader card 130 years after it was revoked

"The British Library is to symbolically reinstate Oscar Wilde’s reader pass, 130 years after its trustees cancelled it following his conviction for gross indecency.

A contemporary pass bearing the name of the Irish author and playwright will be officially presented to his grandson, Merlin Holland, at an event in October, it will be announced on Sunday...

The decision to revoke the pass is recorded in board minutes in 1895, when homosexuality was illegal: “The Trustees directed that Mr Oscar Wilde, admitted as a reader in 1879 and sentenced at the Central Criminal Court on 25th May to two years’ imprisonment with hard labour, be excluded from future use of the Museum’s Reading Room.”...

Holland said: “Oscar had been in Pentonville prison for three weeks when his [pass] to the British Museum Reading Room [now the British Library] was cancelled, so he wouldn’t have known about it, which was probably as well … It would have just added to his misery to feel that one of the world’s great libraries had banned him from books just as the law had banned him from daily life. But the restitution of his ticket is a lovely gesture of forgiveness and I’m sure his spirit will be touched.”

In 2017, Wilde was assumed to be among more than 50,000 gay and bisexual men who were posthumously pardoned, although the Ministry of Justice said no individuals would be named."

An Apparent Cyberattack Hushes the British Library; The New York Times, November 3, 2023

 Alex Marshall, The New York Times; An Apparent Cyberattack Hushes the British Library

"Tasmina Islam, a lecturer in cybersecurity education at King’s College London said in an email that the motivation for attacking a library could be financial.a

“Cybercriminals can access a lot of information from a library, including users’ personal data,” she said. Libraries also “store electronic books, research articles and various intellectual properties, all of which cybercriminals can exploit for illegal distribution,” Islam added.

The British Library incident “served as a warning for other libraries and institutions to assess their own security measures thoroughly,” she said."