The British Museum Reading Room, situated in the centre of the Great Court of the British Museum, used to be the main reading room of the British Library. In 1997, this function moved to the new British Library building at St Pancras, but the Reading Room remains in its original form at the British Museum. Designed by Sydney Smirke and opened in 1857, the Reading Room was in continual use until its temporary closure for renovation in 1997, it was reopened in 2000, from 2007 to 2014 it was used to stage temporary exhibitions. It has since been closed. In the early 1850s the museum library was in need of a larger reading room and the then-Keeper of Printed Books, Antonio Panizzi, following an earlier competition idea by William Hosking, came up with the thought of a round room in the central courtyard; the building was designed by Sydney Smirke and was constructed between 1854 and 1857. The building used cast iron, concrete and the latest technology in ventilation and heating; the dome, inspired by the Pantheon in Rome, has a diameter of 42.6 metres but is not technically free standing: constructed in segments on cast iron, the ceiling is suspended and made out of papier-mâché.
Book stacks built around the reading room were made of iron to take the huge weight and add fire protection. There were forty kilometres of shelving in the stacks prior to the library's relocation to the new site; the Reading Room was opened on 2 May 1857 with a'breakfast' laid out on the catalogue desks. A public viewing was held between 16 May, attracting over 62,000 visitors. Tickets to it included a plan of the library. Regular users had to be issued a reader's ticket by the Principal Librarian. During the period of the British Library, access was restricted to registered researchers only; the Reading Room was used by a large number of famous figures, including notably Sun Yat-sen, Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, Friedrich Hayek, Bram Stoker, Mahatma Gandhi, Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, George Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, Vladimir Lenin, Virginia Woolf, Arthur Rimbaud, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, H. G. Wells and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In 1973, the British Library Act 1972 detached the library department from the British Museum, but it continued to host the now separated British Library in the same Reading Room and building as the museum until 1997.
In 1997 the British Library moved to its own specially constructed building next to St Pancras Station and all the books and shelving were removed. As part of the redevelopment of the Great Court, the Reading Room was renovated and restored, including the papier-mâché ceiling, repaired to its original colour scheme, having undergone radical redecorations; the Reading Room was reopened in 2000, allowing all visitors, not just library ticket-holders, to enter it. It held a collection of 25,000 books focusing on the cultures represented in the museum along with an information centre and the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Centre. In 2007 the books and facilities installed in 2000 were removed, the Reading Room was relaunched as a venue for special exhibitions, beginning with one featuring China's Terracotta Army; the general library for visitors moved to a room accessible through nearby Room 2, but closed permanently on 13 August 2011. This is an earlier library that has had distinguished users, including Thomas Babington Macaulay, William Makepeace Thackeray, Robert Browning, Giuseppe Mazzini, Charles Darwin and Charles Dickens.
A selection of past exhibitions: The British Museum Reading Room is the subject of an eponymous poem, "The British Museum Reading Room", by Louis MacNeice. Much of the action of David Lodge's 1965 novel The British Museum Is Falling Down takes place in the old Reading Room. The'Glass Ceiling' of Anabel Donald's 1994 novel is the ceiling of the Reading Room, where the denouement is set. Alfred Hitchcock used the Reading Room and the dome of the British Museum as a location for the climax of his first sound film Blackmail. Other movies with key scenes in the Reading Room include Night of the Demon and in the 2001 Japanese anime OVA Read or Die, the Room is used as a secret entrance to the British Library's fictional "Special Operations Division". In Sir Max Beerbohm's short story, Enoch Soames, first published in May 1916, an obscure writer makes a deal with the Devil to visit the Reading Room one hundred years in the future, in order to know what posterity thinks about him and his work; the British Museum and the Reading Room serve as the settings for An Encounter at the Museum, an anthology of romance novellas by Claudia Dain and Deb Marlowe, among others.
Virginia Woolf made reference to the British Museum Reading Room in a passage from her 1929 essay, A Room of One's Own. She wrote, "The swing doors swung open, there one stood under the vast dome, as if one were a thought in the huge bald forehead, so splendidly encircled by a band of famous names." Richard Henry Dana, Jr. visited the Reading Room on 10 September 1860 with his London friend Henry T. Parker, reported that "Parker calls & takes me to the British Museum, to see the Reading Room, wh. has been built since 1856. It is the room where students & readers have their desks, & consult the text books, catalogues &c. & from wh. they send orders for books to the Library – the Library not being visited, at all, for study. There is no such room as this in Europe, it is a circle, with dome, lighted from above, & its diameter is 4 fee
Spring Creek is a small town in Marlborough, New Zealand. State Highway 1 runs past the settlement to the west, the Wairau River flows past to the east. Picton is 22 km to the north, Blenheim is 6 km to the south. According to the 2013 New Zealand census, Spring Creek has a population of 1,275, an increase of 3 people since the 2006 census. There were 609 females; the first European settlers were George Dodson, William Soper, Dr Vickerman, in 1850. There was a major flood in 1926. Spring Creek School is a coeducational contributing primary school with a roll of 39. A school was first founded in Spring Creek in 1861 or 1863 The present school was founded in 1873. Wairau Marae is located in Spring Creek, it is the marae of Ngāti Rārua and Ngāti Toa Rangatira, includes the Wairau wharenui. Spring Creek has a railway classification yard on the Main North Line. Moutere Rugby Football Club
Indermark is a village in the Capricorn District Municipality in the Limpopo province of South Africa. The village is situated in the Blouberg Local Municipality; the settlement is 89 km north-west of Polokwane, on the route to Vivo. Indermark is not connected to any railway but people want to connect in order to transport food to Johannesburg and other major centres via rail. Agricultural produce in the area, including tomatoes and avocados, is transported via freight rail; the South African Broadcasting Corporation has neglected the people on the demand for branch located in the village. The South African census showed the population of Village City as 53,028 with 33,84 households in the 2011 census. 6. "Mahlatse Totem" Indermark born & raised multi talented entrepreneur Official website Capricorn District Municipality website