Saved for the nation

Planning, 8 June 2007

Name of plan: British Library Centre for Conservation
Date of publication: January 2005
Commissioned by: British Library

PURPOSE

Building a world-class facility for book conservation and a home for the National Sound Archive.

Many organisations claim that their latest development is "more than just a building", although few live up to the hype. But there are not many places where you can listen to history in the making or see historic scripts being preserved.

Last month saw the opening of the British Library Centre for Conservation, which houses such priceless treasures as the Magna Carta, the Lindisfarne Gospels, Leonardo da Vinci's notebook and the first edition of The Times from 1788. The centre, joined by a terrace to the library's existing site at London's St Pancras, brings together conservation staff and facilities that were previously based at several different sites across the capital.

It is also the new home for the National Sound Archive, which holds more than a million discs, 185,000 tapes and various other recordings, covering everything from music and drama to oral history and wildlife sounds. At around 3.5 million recordings, it is one of the largest collections of its kind in the world.

The opening of the £13,250,000 centre is the culmination of a two-year project involving architects Long and Kentish, principal contractor Sir Robert McAlpine, building services, structures, lighting and acoustic design by Arup, planning and project management by Drivers Jonas and cost consultancy by Davis Langdon.

It proved to be an exacting project. The British Library is not just the UK's main repository for books, manuscripts and recordings but an increasingly significant international centre for their conservation. As more technical courses shut down, the library is a bastion of preservation techniques and materials as well as offering vital training opportunities for conservation professionals.

Visitors enter the library at ground-floor level, going up to the first floor to cross a terrace into the centre. The new building has a front door of its own off the terrace extension, which also covers the service yard from view. The top floor features most of the conservation studios while the lowest houses the sound archive's recording studios. The centre's mission - to convey the importance of conservation - finds expression in the entrance's exhibition area, open to any visitor who want to find out about its work. An adjacent 60-seat seminar room offers training workshops and masterclasses throughout the year.

According to Long and Kentish partner Rolfe Kentish, the key design challenge was striking a balance between the library's desire for a national centre of excellence and a small building without a public entrance or facades that did not directly relate to nearby streets. It also had to avoid inhibiting future developments such as the proposed relocation of King's Cross Thameslink station and the widening of a nearby road to accommodate a bus lane and one-way system. The London Borough of Camden consulted interested parties and reported no objections, while the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment and English Heritage also supported the plans.

The library's brief stipulated the need for good working light in the conservation workshops and acoustic insulation for the recording studios. This meant balancing the demands of very fragile conservation material with the needs of staff, as well as ensuring low energy consumption. A key feature of the conservation studios on the top floor is a sawtooth roof that provides the best possible light for the book conservators.

The building is ventilated by a system that pushes air out through specially designed work benches to be extracted through high-level grilles. The building's thermal mass and its avoidance of direct sunlight help to moderate temperatures and humidity, while all water pipes are located around the building's perimeter to limit the risk of leakages. Overall, the centre achieved a rating of excellent under Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method criteria.

The archive's studios, housed on the lower floor of the building, were designed to meet the highly demanding audio engineering standards needed for high-quality sound recording, digitisation and remastering. The centre has ten transfer studios, two of which are designed to train students in audio archiving, as well as a recording studio, a workshop and laboratory. As Arup notes, limiting intrusive noise was vital. Five underground lines and a major overland rail route run nearby, so the studios are built to "float" on neoprene bearings or rubber pads that absorb the rumble of passing trains. The building is also bomb-proof.

The facilities aim to enhance the library's ability to copy recorded items to international archival standards while allowing greater access to the archive through mastering CD publications or producing audio excerpts. All in all, the centre's opening is a milestone in the history of caring for the collections at the library.

MAIN AIMS

- Bringing together staff dispersed across several sites in London.
- Purpose-built accommodation for highly specialised work.
- Training facilities for conservation and sound archiving.
- Taking conservation collection and the sound archive out of the back room and putting them in the public eye.

KEY FACTS

- Building covers 2,600m2.

- Built at a cost of £13,250,000.

- The library holds 310,000 manuscript volumes from Jane Austen to James Joyce and Handel to the Beatles.

- The sound archive keeps an extensive range of recordings from 19th century cylinders to the latest CDs and DVDs.

- The library, which receives a copy of every publication produced in the UK and Ireland, has more than 625km of shelves and grows by 12km every year.