An old rail goods yard in St Pancras would become the home of the British Library. Opening its doors to the public in November 1997 and receiving an official inauguration by HM Queen Elizabeth II the following June, the Library became the largest public building constructed in Britain in the last 100 years.

Although its modernist design by architect Sir Colin St. John Wilson originally divided critics, the building achieved Grade 1 listed status in 2015.

 

According to the British Library

• Our collections include over 170 million items from almost every language and faith group.

• Together, they occupy over 746km of total shelving – equivalent to the distance from London to Aberdeen, and this is growing an extra 8km every year. Meanwhile our digital collections amount to over 1 petabyte – equivalent to almost 3.5 years of non-stop HD-quality video footage.

• We receive a copy of every publication produced in the UK and Ireland through legal deposit. Last year we received over 500,000 printed and digital items and over 100 terabytes from the UK web domain.

• If you see five items each day, it would take you over 80,000 years to see the whole of the collection.

• Since it launched in 2004, the Endangered Archives Programme has preserved over a million manuscripts, documents, photographs, recordings and other at-risk materia