British Library

Wikipedia contributors · CC BY-SA · EN · 04/10/2026

The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. Based in London, it is one of the largest libraries in the world, with an estimated collection of over 200 million items from multiple countries. As a legal deposit library, it receives copies of all books produced in the United Kingdom and Ireland, as well as a significant proportion of overseas titles distributed in the United Kingdom. The library operates as a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.

The British Library is a major research library, with items in many languages and in many formats, both print and digital: books, manuscripts, journals, newspapers, magazines, sound and music recordings, videos, play-scripts, patents, databases, maps, stamps, prints, drawings. The Library's collections include around 14 million books, along with substantial holdings of manuscripts and items dating as far back as 2000 BC. The library maintains a programme for content acquisition and adds some three million items each year occupying 9.6 km of new shelf space.

The Library's purpose-built building stands next to St Pancras station in London. It was officially opened by Elizabeth II on 25 June 1998, and is classified as a Grade I listed building "of exceptional interest" for its architecture and history. Off-site storage is provided at a second site near Boston Spa in Yorkshire.

History

Early foundations (1972–1997)

The British Library was created on 1 July 1973 after the passing of the . Before this, the national library was part of the British Museum, which provided the bulk of the holdings of the new library, alongside smaller organisations which were folded in (such as the National Central Library, the National Lending Library for Science and Technology and the British National Bibliography). In 1974 functions previously exercised by the Office for Scientific and Technical Information were taken over; in 1982 the India Office Library and Records and the HMSO Binderies became British Library responsibilities. In 1983, the Library absorbed the National Sound Archive, which holds many sound and video recordings, with over a million discs and thousands of tapes.

The core of the Library's historical collections is based on donations and acquisitions from the 18th century known as the "foundation collections", and include the books and manuscripts of Sir Hans Sloane (d. 1753), whose decision to donate his library and natural history collection to the nation led to the formation of the British Museum. The museum trustees purchased the Harleian Library collection of Robert Harley (d. 1721) for £10,000; Also provided to the library was the Cotton library, the former collection of Sir Robert Cotton (d. 1631); this was in public possession and had been housed at Ashburnham House, Westminster. These collections were added to by the Old Royal Library, donated by George II, and the King's Library of George III.

For many years its collections were dispersed in various buildings around central London including Bloomsbury (within the British Museum), Chancery Lane, Bayswater, and Holborn, with an interlibrary lending centre on Thorp Arch Trading Estate near Boston Spa, 2.5 mi east of Wetherby in West Yorkshire, and the newspaper library at Colindale, north-west London.

Move to St Pancras (1997present)

Initial plans for the British Library required demolition of an integral part of Bloomsbury – a seven-acre swathe of streets immediately in front of the Museum, so that the Library could be situated directly opposite. After a long and hard-fought campaign led by Dr George Wagner, this decision was overturned and the library was instead constructed by John Laing plc on a site at Euston Road next to St Pancras railway station.

Following the closure of the Round Reading Room on 25 October 1997 the library stock began to be moved into the St Pancras building. Before the end of that year the first of eleven new reading rooms had opened and the moving of stock was continuing. From 1997 to 2009 the main collection was housed in this single new building and the collection of British and overseas newspapers was housed at Colindale. In July 2008 the Library announced that it would move low-use items to a new Additional Storage Building near Boston Spa in Yorkshire and that it planned to close the newspaper library at Colindale, ahead of a later move to a similar facility on the same site. From January 2009 to April 2012 more than 200 km of material was moved to the Additional Storage Building and is delivered to British Library Reading Rooms in London on request by a daily shuttle service. Construction of the Additional Storage Building was completed in 2013 and the newspaper library at Colindale closed on 8 November 2013. The collection has now been split between the St Pancras and Boston Spa sites. The Library's book storage depot in Woolwich, south-east London is no longer in use.

The new library was designed by the architect Colin St John Wilson in collaboration with his wife MJ Long. Facing Euston Road is a large piazza that includes pieces of public art, such as large sculptures by Eduardo Paolozzi (a bronze statue based on William Blake's study of Isaac Newton) and Antony Gormley. It was the largest public building constructed in the United Kingdom in the 20th century.

A central six-storey glass tower inspired by a similar structure in the Beinecke Library, contains the King's Library with 65,000 printed volumes along with other pamphlets, manuscripts and maps collected by King George III between 1763 and 1820. The Euston Road building was Grade I listed on 1 August 2015.

In December 2009 the storage building at Boston Spa was opened by Rosie Winterton. The facility, costing £26 million, has a capacity for seven million items, stored in more than 140,000 bar-coded containers, which are retrieved by robots from the 162.7 miles of temperature and humidity-controlled storage space.

The British Library has plans to open a third location in Leeds, potentially located in the Grade I listed Temple Works.

Digital archiving and Digital Library System

In 2005 the British Library started the UK Web Archive project, collecting and preserving websites from the UK. Each time the library collected data, it contacted the website owners for the permission to archive their websites.

In 2012 the UK legal deposit libraries signed a memorandum of understanding that have allowed the library: to automatically collect all websites and create a shared technical infrastructure implementing the Digital Library System (DLS) developed by the British Library. On 5 April 2013 the Library announced a project to archive all sites with the suffix .uk in a bid to preserve the nation's "digital memory" (which as of then amounted to about 4.8 million sites containing 1 billion web pages). The Library made all the material publicly available to users by the end of 2013, and would ensure that, through technological advancements, all the material is preserved for future generations, despite the fluidity of the Internet. After UK government passed the "Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-Print Works) Regulations 2013", British Library were able to add an extension to the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 to include non-print electronic publications from 6 April 2013.

Four storage nodes locations (in London, Boston Spa, Aberystwyth, and Edinburgh) are linked via a secure network in constant communication automatically replicate, self-check, and repair data. A complete crawl of every .uk domain (and other Top-level domains) has been added annually to the DLS since 2013, which also contains all of the Internet Archive's 1996–2013 .uk collection. The policy and system is based on that of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, which has crawled the .fr domain annually since 2006; with the help of the Internet Archive until 2010.

2023 cyber attack

On 28 October 2023 the British Library's entire website went down due to a cyber attack, later confirmed as a ransomware attack attributed to ransomware group Rhysida. Catalogues and ordering systems were affected, rendering the great majority of the library's collections inaccessible to readers. The library released statements saying that their services would be disrupted for several weeks, with some disruption expected to persist for several months.

As of January 2024, the British Library continues to experience technology outages as a result of the cyber-attack. By October 2024 many of the previously inaccessible services had been restored, including remote item ordering, online learning services and online manuscripts. A new library management system was launched in late 2025 with an increased access to the catalogue.

Future expansion

In March 2025, the British Library announced plans for a £1.1 billion expansion in partnership with Mitsui Fudosan. The project will expand the library's public spaces, adding 100,000 square feet for cultural, learning, research, and business activities, funded by 600,000 square feet of new commercial and retail areas.

Collections

The British Library is a legal deposit library. In England, legal deposit can be traced back to at least 1610. The Copyright Act 1911 established the principle of the legal deposit, ensuring that the British Library and five other libraries in Great Britain and Ireland are entitled to receive a free copy of every item published or distributed in Britain. The other five libraries are: the Bodleian Library at Oxford; the University Library at Cambridge; Trinity College Library in Dublin; and the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales. The British Library is the only one that must automatically receive a copy of every item published in Britain; the others are entitled to these items, but must specifically request them from the publisher after learning that they have been or are about to be published, a task done centrally by the Agency for the Legal Deposit Libraries.

Under the terms of Irish copyright law (most recently the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000), the British Library is entitled to automatically receive a free copy of every book published in Ireland, alongside the National Library of Ireland, Trinity College Library in Dublin, the library of the University of Limerick, the library of Dublin City University and the libraries of the four constituent universities of the National University of Ireland. The Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library, and the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales are also entitled to copies of material published in Ireland, but again must formally make requests.

The Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 extended United Kingdom legal deposit requirements to electronic documents, such as CD-ROMs and selected websites.

The British Library Document Supply Service (BLDSS) and the Library's Document Supply Collection and its Secure Electronic Delivery is based at the Library's site in Boston Spa. Collections housed in Yorkshire, comprising low-use material and the newspaper and Document Supply collections, make up around 70% of the total material the library holds. The Library also holds the Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections (APAC) which include the India Office Records and materials in the languages of Asia and of north and north-east Africa.

Manuscripts

Foundation collections

The three foundation collections are those which were brought together to form the initial manuscript holdings of the British Museum in 1753:

Cotton manuscripts

Harley manuscripts

Sloane manuscripts

Other named collections

Examples of other "named" collections of manuscripts include:

Arundel Manuscripts

Egerton manuscripts

King's manuscripts

Lansdowne manuscripts

Royal manuscripts

Stefan Zweig Collection

Stowe manuscripts

Yates Thompson manuscripts

Other collections, not necessarily manuscripts:

Lawrence Durrell Collection

Additional manuscripts

The Additional Manuscripts series covers manuscripts that are not part of the named collections, and contains all other manuscripts donated, purchased or bequeathed to the Library since 1756. The numbering begins at 4101, as the series was initially regarded as a continuation of the collection of Sloane manuscripts, which are numbered 1 to 4100.

Newspapers

The Library holds an almost complete collection of British and Irish newspapers since 1840. This is partly because of the legal deposit legislation of 1869, which required newspapers to supply a copy of each edition of a newspaper to the library. London editions of national daily and Sunday newspapers are complete back to 1801. In total, the collection consists of 660,000 bound volumes and 370,000 reels of microfilm containing tens of millions of newspapers with 52,000 titles on 45 km of shelves. From earlier dates, the collections include the Thomason Tracts, comprising 7,200 seventeenth-century newspapers, and the Burney Collection, featuring nearly 1 million pages of newspapers from the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The section also holds extensive collections of non-British newspapers, in numerous languages.

The Newspapers section was based in Colindale in North London until 2013, when the buildings, which were considered to provide inadequate storage conditions and to be beyond improvement, were closed and sold for redevelopment. The physical holdings are now divided between the sites at St Pancras (some high-use periodicals, and rare items such as the Thomason Tracts and Burney collections) and Boston Spa (the bulk of the collections, stored in a new purpose-built facility).

Source and attribution

Adapted from “British Library” by English Wikipedia contributors. Main paragraphs and sections are retained; tables, reference markers and technical markup are omitted. This is an encyclopedic adaptation, not a personal review. Original revision and contributor history ↗. Text is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0 ↗. Check current visitor access, tickets and transport with the relevant operator.