I don’t know how I hadn’t seen it. I was so excited about my niche focus and the thrill of having this time and support to explore and make work that I hadn’t even thought more widely about the Library itself. The portholes, the expansive feeling of calm and possibility - built like an ocean liner. Eccles Institute programme curator Laura Caderera, starts our tour at the maquette of the site with the fact that the British Library was established in 1973 as a result of the British Library Act 1972. I had always thought it older but its just 5 years older than me - all this knowledge collected together in my lifetime. The pace of technological change and obsolescence. The collections house the calls of now extinct animals available to listen to in quiet shock and grief in the lower atrium listening posts.

I vaguely remember reports of the future King’s distaste at the building’s design - it only opened officially in 1998 - the year I moved to London, sleeping on a kitchen floor in a friends flat above a chip shop, getting my first job dishing out spag bol up the BT Tower and second one the day after as uniformed ‘invigilator’ at the Royal Academy keep watch of paintings and people. Prince Charles declared it looked like an ‘academy for secret policemen.’ Now it’s a listed building with a footprint deep below the Euston Road - mile of shelving deep below the raging street struggling to keep up with the sheer volume of printed and digital matter we humans produce and ‘legally deposit’ (Legal Deposit Act 2013).

Laura shows me the currently closed ‘Treasures Gallery’ - a space of alternating displays revealing the gems of what is mainly hidden from public view. So much is quite literally stored beneath the surface from the transcripts of the Kyoto Protocol to the Magna Carta. The room is shut because of some climate control issues. When the Magna Carta was on display in 2024 this ancient legal document was the target of Just Stop Oil protestors. Reverend Sue Parfitt and retired biology teacher Judy Bruce managed to walk through security with a hammer and chisel and proceeded to try to crack the protective glass with the statement ““The Magna Carta is rightly revered, being of great importance to our history, to our freedoms and to our laws. But there will be no freedom, no lawfulness, no rights, if we allow climate breakdown to become the catastrophe that is now threatened. We must get things in proportion. The abundance of life on Earth, the climate stability that allows civilisation to continue, is what must be revered and protected above all else, even above our most precious artefacts.”

As an obsessive disaster movie viewer I think of the film ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ based on the 1999 book ‘The Coming Global Superstorm.’ The world is freezing and survivors do what they have to do in New York’s Public Library - burning furniture and precious artefacts/books - though even then choices are made on what print material is sacrificed - tax law going first. Prince Charles, continuing with the Stasi associations also oddly claimed this looked like a place for burning books when it feels the opposite - a place of sanctuary. So many people shelter here, to dream and make and plan surrounded by the matter of knowledge and imagination. So many people work here taking the steps to setting up businesses that the British Library set up the Business and IP Centre to offer more support.

For me, as I sustain an artistic practice and attempt to balance the demands of fundraising and production with time to imagine and make this fellowship is space - the space of ocean liners and the open sea. And although I have set myself a task and outlined a plan to investigate and make work around, these meanders and asides are part of this adventure. There is a falcon called Weatherby. There is a 5 story basement. A place full of people. Full of stories.