Members of the London Library are contesting a multimillion-pound redevelopment that would allocate significant space in the historic St James’s Square institution to catering, events, and a rooftop terrace, even as the Library acknowledges it is running out of room for books. The dispute has highlighted fundamental questions regarding the commercialisation of libraries and other cultural institutions. Space for books, reading, and research is increasingly evaluated in terms of revenue and financial return. At the same time, users of these institutions have little influence over decisions that shape their future.
Book historian Nicholas Pickwoad has intervened by challenging both the redevelopment and the treatment of dissenting members in a recent letter to the Times Literary Supplement. Pickwoad trained in bookbinding and conservation and has served as an adviser on book conservation to the National Trust. His career includes work at Harvard University Library and the Ligatus Research Centre. Founded in 1841, the London Library calls itself the world’s largest independent lending library, with a collection of about one million volumes. It has served generations of writers and researchers and continues to promote itself as a place for reading, writing, and research. The institution now also prominently brands itself as “the home of literary inspiration”. This shift in language coincides with a physical transformation of the building, as catering, events, and attracting new audiences become increasingly significant.
A central contradiction underlies the controversy. The London Library states that its shelf capacity is “effectively full,” with occupancy in many areas between 92 and 95 per cent. The Library adds approximately 6,000 books each year, necessitating about 180 metres of additional shelving annually. Space constraints are already impacting the collection. The Library has acknowledged that it is considering removing materials that no longer meet members’ needs, are available electronically, or fall outside its core collection strengths. Depending on the material, this may involve sale, donation, or recycling. Under these conditions, valuable space is being committed to enhanced catering and events provision.
The controversy is not fundamentally about members’ access to coffee. The essential issue concerns what should take priority when one of Britain’s most important independent libraries lacks sufficient space for its books. The plans’ financial scale has intensified opposition. GB News reported in January 2026 that a development including a rooftop garden and café was estimated at £5 million. By March, The Londoner described opponents contesting £7 million plans for a sixth-floor café and rooftop terrace.
Management has presented the development as part of an effort to expand the institution. GB News reported a target of attracting 800 additional members, generating more than £400,000 a year in membership fees. Such arguments are now commonplace across the cultural sector. Libraries, museums, universities, galleries, and similar institutions are required to seek additional revenue sources and to utilise their buildings for commercial purposes. Catering, venue hire, and events are presented as essential ways to finance the institution’s core cultural functions.
But the supposedly supporting activities increasingly reshape the institution they are meant to sustain. A reading room or a collection of books generates no immediate financial return, whereas a commercial event, catered function, or café does. When income generation becomes the primary criterion for evaluating space, activities fundamental to a library inevitably face pressure from those that can produce revenue.
The conflict has intensified as opponents claim that efforts to organise among members have been restricted. Campaigners distributed leaflets opposing the development, after which the Library introduced a rule prohibiting the distribution of “posters, flyers, leaflets, notices or similar anywhere on the premises”. Historian and former trustee Rick Stroud publicly condemned the restriction as censorship “right at the heart of a library”. The Library denied accusations of suppressing debate and said it welcomed members expressing their views on its plans.
The controversy persisted. The Londoner reported that chairman Simon Godwin confronted campaigners distributing flyers on the Library steps and informed them that leafleting would be prohibited. Godwin was formally confirmed as chairman of the trustees in November 2023. Before this role, he was a founding partner and finance director of the asset-management firm Fundsmith. He was also a long-standing London Library member and part of its Founders’ Circle of supporters.
This background is not primarily personal. It points towards the wider system of governance imposed upon cultural institutions. Decisions affecting collections, reading spaces and the conditions experienced by researchers are increasingly made within structures dominated by considerations of fundraising, finance, property utilisation, branding and institutional growth. Members and professional users are asked for their views, but they do not exercise effective control. Defenders of the redevelopment have attempted to present the controversy as a conflict between modernisation and conservative resistance to change. This is a false opposition.
There is nothing inherently progressive about replacing space devoted to books or scholarship with commercial activities. Nor is there anything reactionary about insisting that a library’s principal responsibility is to preserve books, develop its collections, and provide the best possible conditions in which they can be studied.
The members’ alternative is modest. Rather than a fully catered commercial café, opponents have supported an improved members’ room where readers can rest, talk, eat and obtain tea or coffee without transforming another part of the institution into a hospitality operation.
The issue is therefore not improvement versus stagnation. It is what constitutes an improvement to a library. The London Library dispute has important precedents. In 2013, an intense controversy erupted at Senate House Libraries at the University of London over plans to sell four seventeenth-century Shakespeare folios. Academic opposition led to the abandonment of the proposed sale, and the library director subsequently resigned.
The Senate House struggle revealed in particularly stark form a contradiction that confronts collections everywhere. From a scholarly standpoint, rare books and historic collections constitute part of humanity’s accumulated cultural inheritance. From the market’s standpoint, they can appear as financial assets whose sale might release capital for another purpose. The same contradiction applies to buildings. To a reader or historian, a reading room provides the physical conditions necessary for intellectual work. Viewed according to commercial criteria, the same room occupies extraordinarily expensive central London property while generating little or no direct income.
The London Library is admittedly a private subscription institution whose membership cannot be identified with the millions who depend on public-library services. But this does not make the controversy any less significant. If an institution with an international reputation, around a million volumes and a comparatively affluent membership is under pressure to devote scarce space to catering and income-generating functions even while its book stacks approach capacity, the situation facing public libraries deprived of adequate funding is still more severe.
Years of austerity have demonstrated the consequences. Libraries must reduce expenditure, justify their premises, and dispose of supposedly surplus resources. Cultural provision that previous generations fought to establish is treated as a financial liability whenever it cannot demonstrate an immediate commercial return. This development cannot be separated from the increasing concentration of social wealth at the opposite pole of society. Vast private fortunes coexist with libraries, universities, museums, and arts institutions permanently instructed that they lack sufficient money to support their basic activities.
The claim that cultural institutions must therefore accommodate themselves to the market accepts precisely the conditions responsible for their degradation. Libraries cannot ultimately be defended according to commercial criteria because their true social value cannot be measured commercially. No meaningful financial calculation can express the value of preserving an obscure book until a future researcher needs it, allowing a young writer to encounter ideas unavailable elsewhere, or maintaining collections accumulated through generations of intellectual labour. The same principle extends beyond libraries to archives, museums, galleries, orchestras and universities. Their essential purpose is incompatible with reducing every part of cultural life to a source of income. The opposition mounted by London Library members therefore deserves support. But defending the institution means more than defeating a particular café plan. It requires rejecting the idea that culture must continually demonstrate its profitability to justify its existence.
Libraries and other cultural institutions should receive the resources required to expand their collections, employ skilled staff, preserve their buildings and make knowledge as widely accessible as possible. Readers, researchers and those who work in these institutions must have a genuine democratic voice in determining their development. The struggle over the London Library is, in this sense, one expression of a much broader conflict: whether humanity’s accumulated cultural inheritance is to be maintained and expanded as a social resource, or increasingly subordinated to the demands of the market.
Bibliography
Primary source
Pickwoad, Nicholas. Letter concerning the London Library redevelopment and members’ opposition. Times Literary Supplement, 2026. Exact issue number and publication date to be confirmed.
London Library and governance
The London Library. The home of literary inspiration. London Library website. https://www.londonlibrary.co.uk/
The London Library. Building Connections: Phase One Update. London Library website.
The London Library. Making Space: Our Collection – Making Space for the Future. London Library website. https://www.londonlibrary.co.uk/making-space
The London Library. Minutes of the 183rd Annual General Meeting. November 2024.
The London Library. History of The London Library. London Library website.
Charity Commission for England and Wales. The London Library, charity no. 312175: Trustees.
The Bookseller. “Godwin confirmed as new chair of trustees at The London Library.” 15 November 2023.
Coverage of the dispute
Jeffries, Richard. “Historic 180-year-old library engulfed in censorship row as members left furious by strict new rule.” GB News, 31 January 2026.
The Londoner. “The civil war inside the capital’s most elite literary institution.” 11 March 2026.
Moore, Charles. “Has the assisted dying lobby considered the guillotine?” The Spectator, 2 November 2024.
Marr, Andrew. Commentary on the London Library dispute. New Statesman, 2026. Exact title and publication date to be confirmed.
The Bookseller. “The London Library begins consultation on improvements to St James’s home.”
Historical and wider context
Eliot, T. S., and Rupert Hart-Davis. “London Library.” Letter to The Times, 5 November 1959.
AEC Café. “The London Library in St James’ Square, London by Haworth Tompkins Ltd.” 30 May 2013.
Stillman, Michael. “Library Director Resigns Over Attempt to Sell Shakespeare Folios.” Rare Book Monthly, November 2013.
Ligatus Research Centre. “Nicholas Pickwoad.”
