In Praise of Libraries

This has been library week for me. (Harry Eyres from the FT) It was time to renew my alumnus library card at the British Library of Political and Economic Science housed in the Lionel Robbins building at the London School of Economics. When I studied there, I couldn’t always relish the richness of one of the world’s greatest social science libraries because of the sense of being on a conveyor belt that comes with a one-year MSc; I was surrounded by people whose natural pace was at least one Mach number faster than mine. But I looked forward to the time when I could enjoy using the library as an independent reader and researcher. I anticipated, for example, stimulating hours spent browsing the volumes of the excellent ecological journal Environmental Values, edited from the University of Lancaster.

Well, they were some time coming, but I made my way up Norman Foster’s spiral-stepped ramp to the second floor and located the green-bound volumes, and took one to a quiet study area on the perimeter of the airy, light building, well away from the click of keyboards and the hormonal rush of the world’s most fashion-conscious student bodies. I revisited the fascinating case of the Isle of Harris superquarry, in which an application to destroy one of the most magnificent landscapes in Europe to extract hard-core for road building was rejected by the Scottish environment minister Sam Galbraith