We went to the British Museum on the eleventh. And it was lit. We got to go inside the Round Reading Room (which is currently not open to the public and hasn’t been since the 1990s (!!!!!!!)) and see all of their archival material.
The British Museum does not get much (if any at all) funding for archiving, so they are currently using the Reading Room as their archive space. There are so many documents that are, like, three to four hundred years old, and they don’t really have a proper space for them. Maybe this blog post will help get them some help!
We were incredibly lucky to be able to even see this room, let alone observe some of the treasures within. We got to see the signatures of Karl Marx and Oscar Wilde when they would come to the Library and do research!
There were a lot of boxes that held actual pieces of the Parthenon. It was very neat to discuss the legal implications of that (especially since George Clooney’s wife has been getting on the Library to return it, on behalf of Greece). All in all, the Library has the full legal jurisdiction to own those pieces. Quite interesting.
British Studies 2019 