Tristram Hunt: The British Museum mustn’t throw out its history

“For some it is a workshop, for others a lounge; there are those who put it to the highest uses, while in many cases it serves as a shelter — a refuge, in more senses than one, for the destitute.” So wrote Amy Levy in her 1889 essay, Readers at the British Museum.

Once again, that is set to change. It is well over a decade since the BM’s reading role headed north to the British Library on Euston Road. But BM director Neil MacGregor is now thinking about transforming the gorgeous, domed Reading Room altogether. Among the options under consideration is pulling out the desks and shelves to create a permanent exhibition space.

This would be a mistake.

At a time when libraries are closing across the country, the Reading Room stands as a lodestar for learning and culture. It is the Jerusalem, Mecca and Rome of library spaces and deserves to be protected as both a contemplative space in the capital and as the entry point into some of the most significant passages of British history.

It was in June 1850 that Karl Marx obtained his reader’s ticket: over the next three decades it would provide both a daily place of refuge from his cramped, chaotic domestic life and an unrivalled source of research. It was these years of working slumped in seat H10, plagued by boils, hiding from debtors, distracted by the Egyptian and Greek artefacts, that culminated in the publication of Das Kapital. As Mikhail Gorbachev once joked on a visit to London: “If people don’t like Marxism, they should blame the British Museum.”

A much more respectable library user was Arthur Conan Doyle, who would weave the Reading Room into many a Sherlock Holmes tale. In The Blue Carbuncle, the protagonist Henry Baker works at the BM and is described as giving the impression “generally of a man of learning and letters who has had ill-usage at the hands of fortune”. Down the row from Conan Doyle sat Bram Stoker, mugging up on the belief systems of Romanian peasants and the geography of Transylvania for his masterpiece, Dracula.

But perhaps it was Virginia Woolf who best described the joy of working under the immense dome. As she asked in A Room of One’s Own: “If truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British Museum, where is truth?”

Philosophers, novelists, émigrés, economists, radicals — the Reading Room is an axis point in our island story. It has served as the fulcrum for ideas, pamphlets, and novels that changed the world. For those interested in the history of European thought it stands as sacred ground.

Amidst the squash of the millions who now march through the doors of the BM, it is also a place of quiet and reflection. Leaning back in the seats looking up at Sydney Smirke’s cupola is, for a moment, to enjoy a vicarious whiff of greatness.

Under MacGregor’s masterful stewardship, the BM has positioned itself as the greatest global museum. It is a place of learning and scholarship which attracts visitors from around the world. But it should not lose sight of its Britishness. By all means have more displays of international artefacts but let’s not forget the roots of this museum in a city and a country to which it contributed so much.