Inspiration Guaranteed

The first thing you notice is the smell — a mixture of old paper, leather and Victorian dust. My response to it by now is automatic: I turn off my phone, plug in my laptop and start writing. This olfactory oasis is the London Library in the corner of St James’s Square (not to be confused with the British Library on the Marylebone Road). It is a product of the Victorian age, founded by Thomas Carlyle in 1841 in protest at not being able to borrow books from the British Library, but today its membership is booming, particularly among the young. The double-height reading room, which looks out over St James’s Square, is full from Monday to Saturday with an eclectic mixture of: young people tapping out screenplays; novelists like Harriet Evans, Lissa Evans, Jessie Burton, Victoria Hislop, David Nicholls and John O’Farrell; historians such as Simon Schama, Hallie Rubenhold, Tim Bouverie and Victor Sebestyen; comedians Stephen Fry and Richard Ayoade; a few film stars likeTom Hanks, Natasha Machelhone and Hugh Grant

-Helena Bonham Carter is thePresident, and the odd country member having a quick snooze under the London Review of Books in the famous red leather library chairs.

My first encounter with the library was at the age of seven. My father used to go on Saturday mornings and park me in the children’s section, where I was introduced to the world of Angela Brazil. I joined as an adult in 1992, and my home has been full of London Library books ever since. You can take out fifteen books at a time, and the only time you have to return them is when they are needed by another member. When Dickens was writing A Tale of Two Cities, his friend Thomas Carlyle selected a heap of books about the French Revolution and sent them round to Doughty Street by cart. The recent digitisation of the Library’s membership forms reveals that George Bernard Shaw wrote on his application for life membership ‘my wife who was a life member, died this morning. As I am in my eighty seventh year, I will not survive for very long.”

Unlike most libraries of this size, you can wander through the seventeen miles of books in the ‘stacks’, arranged according to the library’s idiosyncratic cataloguing system. As the library’s collection is one hundred and eighty-five years old, every category is a palimpsest of bibliographical history. When Kazuo Ishiguro — a member since 1985 — was browsing the stacks, he chanced upon a book by Harold Laski, The Dangers of Being a Gentleman. “It was this book,” Ishiguro recalled, “that led to The Remains of the Day.” The book is still there, filed under Science and Misc. Etiquette.

In the history section under Kings and Queens, English, Victoria, which is deep in the stacks, the collection begins with bound court circulars, Victoria’s own bestseller Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, memoirs of her reign by courtiers like Frederick Ponsonby, and then the biographies — which range from the hagiographic ones from the 1900s to the tart take-down by Lytton Strachey, and lately the feminist reevaluations by the likes of Lucy Worsley and Julia Baird. When I was researching my TV drama about Victoria, I used the court circulars to uncover details which biographers had omitted: in 1846 Prince Albert had been skating on the frozen lake in the grounds of Buckingham Palace and had fallen in and nearly drowned. Fortunately, Victoria was there to raise the alarm — exactly the kind of dramatic nugget for a Christmas special.

I cross-checked this in the cavernous Times Room, which contains bound volumes of the newspaper dating back over the last two hundred years and is the closest I will ever get to time travel. It is the favourite spot in the library of the bestselling historian ( the Stalin Affair) and podcaster Giles Milton. “The Times Room is one of the great marvels of the London Library — a time capsule that transports you directly back to the past,” he says. “Within its rolling stacks you’ll find firsthand accounts from the Battle of Trafalgar, the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb and Luftwaffe raids over London. It’s a little corner of the library where history comes dramatically to life, jumping off the pages of those original editions of The Times.”

The red-carpeted main stairs of the library are lined with photographs of the library’s hall of fame, which includes fourteen Nobel laureates and Bloomsbury stalwarts like Virginia Woolf (when she joined at the age of twenty-two, she gave her occupation as spinster), her sister Vanessa Bell and E. M. Forster (who was given a life membership by his aunt and later supported Siegfried Sassoon’s application to join). T. S. Eliot was a member, as were Evelyn Waugh and Paul Robeson — not to mention Bram Stoker, William Morris and even Stanley Kubrick. I am tempted to write a play in which all these very different writers are trapped in the stack marked Lit. Crit. Eng.

For a literary fanboy or fangirl, there is always the chance that the book you have just picked up could have been perused by Elizabeth Bowen or Nancy Mitford. And for the alumnae of the London Library’s Emerging Writers Programme (the only free programme for creative writing in the country — a recent alumna, Lucy Steeds, won Waterstones Book of the Year in 2025), there is the dream that their picture will one day hang on that very same staircase, although perhaps not next to the Gents.

The library is a charity, not a club (anyone can join for the price of two flat whites a week, or one iced latte if you are under thirty), but it definitely creates a club-like sense of belonging among its members. Jesse Norman, a young playwright who joined five years ago, calls the library “an oasis in the middle of London. I would sleep there if I could.” Members who use the library to write in are obsessive about their favourite desk. Historian Victor Sebestyen says, “It’s a scramble to get to the ‘right’ desk. A few of us regulars turn up fifteen minutes before the library opens at 9.30 — we are called the steps club — to make sure we won’t be disappointed. It’s very important; I wouldn’t feel right all day if I was at someone else’s desk.” His last book, Weimar, was written at the last desk along in the Art Room, next to the Hist. Shoes, Eur. section.

My spot is on the north floor front, overlooking St James’s Square — from there I have had a bird’s-eye view of bicycle thieves at work, and of the late Queen being ushered into a club on the opposite side of the square. I was sitting at the same desk when I got an alert on my laptop announcing the news of her death.

Of course, any membership organisation that has been going for 185 years (longer even than the National Trust) is bound to have its disagreements. There is currently a certain amount of disquiet among a few longstanding library members about the plans to redevelop the sixth floor (currently furnished with a warren of desks, a temperamental coffee machine and a score of stained mugs, plus a few rodents — non-members, obv) into a reading room with a café, a place for members to congregate and (gasp) a roof garden. The veterans view these plans with deep suspicion; there have been mutterings of the London Library turning into the Groucho Club, but as the British Library, the Bodleian and the University Library in Cambridge have all built cafés without losing their character, one hopes their fears are unfounded. There were similar objections when, during Covid, the use of laptops was permitted in the Reading Room. It is now packed, while a smaller laptop-free space is almost always empty.

I was once writing on my laptop and a very cross lady member leaned over and said, “Can you stop typing so loudly — I can hardly hear myself think.” I think what really annoyed her was my evident productivity. I find I work much harder in the library because everyone else is. As the novelist Victoria Hislop, who frequently writes in the library, says, “I recently looked up the vows of Trappist monks — they speak when necessary for their work or community but avoid idle chatter to keep their minds focused. The same could apply to us London Library members.”

Although as the mean membership age decreases, so the people-watching opportunities have become more intense. There is one member who turns up wearing what looks like a Hussar’s uniform complete with gold braid and shako, or, in hotter weather, an NYPD outfit sporting what looks suspiciously like a taser. Jordan Waller, the actor and writer who is a library stalwart, says, “With over a million books and some of the best-looking literary talent in town, the possibilities are endless.” The stacks definitely have an erotic charge, I once disturbed a couple having a heated encounter in Topography. Tumuli. Cont. They won’t be the first or I suspect the last.

In its 185th year, the library is opening a New Room next week (entirely funded by philanthropy), a space that can be booked by members and by charities such as First Story and the Arvon Foundation. As school libraries diminish, fifty London state sixth forms have now signed up to the library’s free school membership scheme. Not to mention it’s Emerging Writers Scheme which gives free membership and creative writing mentoring to twenty writers a year. Plus if you live in the country or overseas the Library will post books to you.

But although its demographic is changing, and the Library is doing more for a wider range of people, the blissful hush of the place remains the same. In a world full of other people’s music, and cacophonous telephone calls, walking into the Issue Hall is to feel the hubbub outside world drop away. Unlike every west end theatre I have been to recently, there are no discordant ring tones disturbing the deep and satisfying silence. The London Library remains a very good deed in an increasingly naughty world.

You can be part of this miraculous place by joining here - for the freelancers among us the fee is tax deductible as a professional expense. I can’t guarantee romantic frisson but there is plenty of other fun not to mention inspiration to be found in the stacks.