British Library to Rent Out Reading Rooms as Co-Working Space

The British Library will convert three of its eleven reading rooms into paid co-working space next summer, removing more than a quarter of its research capacity to raise revenue. Readers learned of the plan last week through an email bluntly titled "Transforming your Library."

The library said 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 free research estate was "ensuring we generate the necessary revenue to keep our core services free."

That trade — charging businesses for space so that ordinary readers keep free access — is the core of a bitter dispute now playing out around one of Britain's most consequential public institutions.

What is at stake at Euston Road?

The British Library has occupied its brick complex on the Euston Road since 1997. According to the engineering firm Arup, which documented the building, it claims to be the largest public building constructed in the United Kingdom in the 20th century. Behind its exterior — described by Guardian columnist Andy Beckett as both forbidding and exhilarating — sit 11 reading rooms that Beckett calls unusually elegant and comfortable, plus one of the world's most extensive print and digital collections.

Access is free to anyone over 18. That openness is precisely what the new plan puts under strain.

Take the arithmetic. Three rooms out of eleven is roughly 27 percent of the library's reading capacity gone in a single project. The library frames this as a rescue of its core services. Critics will read it as a surrender of them.

Why does this feel like a familiar pattern?

Beckett, whose column broke the dispute into public view, argues the library's predicament follows a recognizable script. In a crowded country short of public money, any expansive public building that seems underused becomes vulnerable, he writes.

The sequence runs like this:

• Professional critics of state spending claim taxpayers' money is being wasted.
• Managers under financial pressure argue the building must be used more intensely.
• Some spaces get commercialised and offered for rent.
• The building's original open, uncommodified, egalitarian quality is steadily sliced away.

Beckett's warning is that the British Library is "in danger of that fate." The co-working conversion, in his framing, is not an isolated revenue decision but the first visible cut of many.

His column's headline makes the sharper point: once reading rooms become co-working spaces, "it's all too easy to imagine what comes next."

What is not being said?

The library's email does not specify how much revenue the rentals must generate, which businesses have been consulted, or whether any alternative funding routes were exhausted first. It also does not say what happens to the science and social science collections that the three rooms currently serve — whether they relocate, shrink or become appointment-only.

Nor is there a stated endpoint. If the revenue target is missed, the pressure will be to commercialize further space, not to restore what was lost. Revenue-driven conversions rarely reverse themselves.

Readers, for their part, were notified rather than consulted, at least on the evidence of the email itself. For an institution whose brand rests on free and equal access, that process choice matters as much as the outcome.

The so-what

The library's bet is that selling a quarter of its reading rooms can subsidize the rest. Beckett's counter is that each commercial slice makes the next one easier — and that a national library converted into a business centre is hard to convert back.

The work begins next summer. What the library has not published — a revenue target, a tenant list, a guarantee that no further rooms follow — will determine whether this is a rescue or the start of the slicing Beckett predicts.

By Olivia Hart, Business Bearings