THE KING'S LIBRARY

When I was studying architecture my tutors would constantly talk about the British Library, then in construction, and its architect Sandy Wilson's noble struggles to bring his 1977 vision of heroic modernism to the Euston Road. I spent more time mourning the loss of the Euston Arch (18 months before my birth) and sitting in the existing library's round Reading Room at the British Museum, leafing through John Evelyn's own copies of his own books, but then I was always contrary. The new building, opened in 1998, isn't much to my taste (the one really beautiful view, above, is from outside a rather hidden loo) but it does have a truly magical secret at the heart of its rambling brick structure: the King's Library. This is a 6-storey tower of black steel and glass built to hold the 65,000 books of King George III, their lovely spines facing the glass. In George III's time they were in a big octagonal room at Buckingham House. Here, their beauty is almost hidden from the entrance by deep concrete slabs of walkways crossing its front (below left) and only revealed when you get close enough to see it soaring up from the basement below. It's an odd bit of architecture, as if a baby Seagram Building was trapped inside an overgrown Katsura Imperial Palace.

The King's beautiful books are on moveable shelf stacks; from time to time you'll see one glide back from the glass front, a librarian slip through the gap and take down an old calf-bound volume, in a rare and wonderful piece of biblio-theatre. The library has a gallery displaying extraordinary treasures from its collection, and stages exhibitions, but neither can match the fascination of the King's Library.