All Change in the British Museum
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| It used to be a splendid library, one of the jewels in Britain's cultural heritage. Now it is a coffee shop. Bah. Humbug. |
When we visited the British Museum in June we were astonished to walk through the front door and into a vast open space. Previously we had entered a spacious lobby in the far wall of which was the cloak room where weary tourists could leave their backpacks or umbrellas, and the entrance to the circular Reading Room, which could only be visited if you had a reader's card - and very few of these were issued.
Now the far wall has been swept away and the circular library stands in splendid isolation in the middle of a vast paved courtyard which is roofed by a very modern curved area of glass that looks like a geodesic dome mated with a torus. Very impressive.
Less impressive was the fact that many of the galleries in which we were interested have been rearranged and a lot of the objects we wanted to see had been moved or even removed. The Rosetta Stone, for example, which for two centuries has reclined in an iron cradle now stands upright, allegedly because this will give a better idea of how it would have looked when first erected. I beg leave to doubt, however, that it originally stood behind shiny, reflective glass which makes effective photography all but impossible.
After a frustrating couple of hours devoted to tracking down the new locations of the objects we wanted to photograph we had leisure to wander round the rest of the museum. Our first visit was to the Reading Room, which looks unchanged on the inside - though an attendant informed us that it is no longer stocked with the unrivalled collection of books that it once held. They are now at the new British Library a couple of miles away and the impressive looking volumes that line the walls are, in fact, the records of parliamentary proceedings!
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| Queen of the Night plaque in the former library of the British Museum. |
We were delighted, however, to discover that right next to the door was the museum's latest acquisition, the "Queen of the Night" plaque about which we wrote recently.
After admiring the charms of the lady - which did not include her feet! - we headed for the galleries where once the museum's collection of manuscripts was displayed, for among these was the famous Codex Sinaticus. We were disappointed to find that these, too, were now at the British Library.
In their place the long gallery known as the King's Library has been fitted out as the sort of room which a wealthy patron of the Enlightenment might have created. There is an eclectic collection of objects from just about every continent and culture: Greek statues, Egyptian sarcophagii, modern busts of the great and the good, journals and diaries of explorers and discoverers, clay tablets from Sumer, I am not sure but what there may even have been a stuffed animal or two.
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| Replica of the Rosetta Stone in the new gallery at the British Museum. |
We did not have time to roam about the room and take it all in, but after photographing some of the clay tablets - including the Nabonidus Cylinder - we prepared to leave and nearly tripped over the Rosetta Stone, reclining in its cradle behind a door!
I presume it is a replica, though it is sufficiently faithful that no one could tell the difference. It even has the original acquisition details painted on the side of the stone, a piece of sacrilege that would never be allowed these days.
Anyway, if you visit the British Museum, don't waste film trying to photograph the Rosetta Stone in the Egyptian gallery. It will probably be obscured by tourists and certainly obscured by the pane of glass. Head instead for the King's Gallery where, unnoticed and ignored by the many-headed, you can photograph the replica to your heart's content.
