A tax on intellectuals: Terrace Cafe at the British Library reviewed

The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom, and it sits like a red-brick crab on the Euston Road, on the site of an old goods yard between St Pancras and Euston. The older British Museum Library, whose collection was founded on the books of George III, Sir Hans Soane, Robert Harley and Sir Robert Cotton, was in the British Museum, but that gorgeous reading room is now a glass atrium with overpriced cafés and shops selling historical tat for children: cultural vandalism, then, and incitement to migraine. Instead we have the red-brick crab. It was opened by the Queen in 1998 and it is Grade I-listed, so, unless there is a war, we are stuck with it. Perhaps architects don’t read books. When I look at this library, I wonder if they have eyes.

It if looks like an out-of-town supermarket when it isn’t looking like a crab, the interior is so un-self-aware as to be insane: an airport lounge with escalators, bad sculpture and a fine medieval library — the King’s Library — plonked down in the middle like a mistake, or a lament.