British Library to Convert Three Reading Rooms Into Paid Co-Working Space

The British Library will convert three of its eleven reading rooms into rentable co-working space next summer, removing more than a quarter of its research capacity in a bid to raise revenue. The plan was announced to readers by email last week under the subject line, "Transforming your Library".

The library told users that work 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 stated justification for shrinking the research estate was "ensuring we generate the necessary revenue to keep our core services free".

Guardian columnist Andy Beckett, who broke the dispute into public view on 29 October, argues the move signals a deeper danger. In his analysis, any expansive public building in a crowded country short of public money becomes vulnerable. Critics of state spending can claim taxpayers' money is wasted. Managers under financial pressure can argue the building must be used more intensely, with some spaces commercialised and rented out. The original open, uncommodified, egalitarian quality of the building, he writes, can be steadily sliced away.

What does this change for readers?

The immediate change is concrete. From next summer, the Science and Social Sciences Reading Rooms — three of the library's eleven — will stop functioning as quiet research space and start functioning as a commercial workspace for hire by businesses. Anyone over 18 currently uses the library free of charge, with access to one of the world's most extensive print and digital collections.

The longer-term question Beckett raises is cumulative. If reading rooms become co-working spaces, he suggests, it is all too easy to imagine what comes next: further commercialisation justified by the same revenue logic, each decision reasonable in isolation, the public character of the institution eroded slice by slice.

A building built for the public

The British Library has occupied its site on the Euston Road since 1997. The huge brick building — Beckett calls it a "brick battleship" — claims to be the largest public building constructed in the UK in the 20th century. Its exterior, both forbidding and exhilarating, conceals eleven unusually elegant and comfortable reading rooms.

The dispute now underway is, in Beckett's framing, bitter and fundamental. It pits the library's revenue needs against the principle that motivated its construction: a national collection, free to use, housed in generous public space. The library's management maintains that commercial hiring is the price of keeping core services free. Beckett's warning is that the price may be the library itself, or at least the parts of it that made it egalitarian.

The conversion begins next summer, and readers, staff and the wider public will judge whether the revenue raised justifies the research space lost.