New Bodleian Library

New Bodleian Library

Library and book stack, with porter's lodge, built 1935-46 by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, with a roof-level addition of 1968 by Robert Potter. The building is constructed with a steel frame clad in Bladon rubble stone with Clipsham stone dressings and aluminium alloy windows. It consists of a 3-storey outer block, one room deep, which encloses a central rectangular 11-storey book stack, three storeys of which are below ground and extend to the edges of the surrounding service driveway. The building has flat roofs throughout.

The Broad Street front comprises an 8-bay central block set back from the road frontage. The westernmost bay is narrower and lights a staircase. The ground floor is articulated with a blind arcade of plain ashlar pilasters supporting an entablature and cartouches with heraldic devices, enclosing recesses with wide multi-paned windows and top-opening lights. The first floor has tall multi-paned windows with top-opening lights, each with plain stone lintels and stepped jambs, linked by a raised cill band, with a rubble soldier course below and a slender projecting parapet coping above. The second floor is recessed and has 14 closely-set multi-paned windows and a single staircase window to the left, divided by raised ashlar panels with moulded drops and with a soldier course above plain stone lintels, and topped with an ashlar cornice. To the left, a two-bay projection to the street line continues the ground floor arcade detail. The left-hand bay has an open vehicular entrance below two low storeys, each with two low but wide multi-paned casement windows. The right-hand bay has three multi-paned ground floor windows, a tripartite multi-paned first-floor window with a metal-railed balcony carried on moulded brackets, and a similar but smaller tripartite window to the recessed second floor. The return maintains the articulation of the central block, with two windows to the ground and first floors and three to the second floor.

To the right of the central block, a curved corner contains a single tall thin multi-paned staircase window, leading to the recessed entrance bay. The entrance is framed by stout moulded wooden doors set between pilasters similar to those of the central block arcade, but here carrying an elaborate Artisan Mannerist broken pediment containing a bust of Sir Thomas Bodley (inspired by his monument in Merton College) below a secondary decorative curved pediment. The entrance bay has two first-floor and two second-floor windows similar to those in the central block. A second curved corner leads to the Parks Road front. From the street, only the balustraded parapet of the central book stack and the tops of the plain windows and horizontal roof-line of the 1968 Indian Institute Library addition in front of it are readily visible. The 21 tall slender windows of the book stack can be seen only from a higher level.

The Parks Road front is 11 bays wide and continues the architectural detail of the Broad Street front in a symmetrical arrangement about a central entrance framed by pilasters and with an open pediment containing a heraldic cartouche. The central 5 bays project slightly, and the second floor in this section is brought out flush and crowned with a balustraded parapet, echoed by the similar parapet of the book stack set back above. The second floor windows to either end of this central section have aprons.

The secondary elevations to the north and west have details of similar character and quality to the main fronts but are slightly less elaborately decorated. There is a broad service entrance to the west front. Discreet fire doors have been added recently at the base of the staircases at either end of the north front.

The interior of the outer block, one room deep, is divided from the book stack by a continuous corridor, with staircases with decorative metal rails at the four corners. Most corridor and staircase walls retain a dado of Taynton stone with rough plaster above, originally unpainted. Some remains of the original decorative rubber floors survive, notably at second-floor level, and there remains one area of fragments of the original cork facing to the treads and risers of the stairs. The tiny oval vestibule within the ceremonial Broad Street entrance retains carved decoration, though the doorway opposite the entrance has been blocked. The main entrance hall and the eastern corridor, divided from it by blocky piers, also retain a carved frieze.

The internal layout of the outer block was designed to be flexible, as it was originally anticipated that more space might be required for book stacks, though in practice more space has been required for reading rooms. This has been achieved with minimal structural intervention. The chief public rooms are on the first floor. The main reading room to the north retains its original jazzy inlaid wooden ceiling, mahogany bookcases, reading desks, light fittings and clock. The issue desk has been slightly modified and extended. The reading room has been extended into the adjacent former gallery, where the flat multi-paned roof lights have been blocked. The former map room to the east has been subdivided. Throughout the building much of the original joinery remains, of high standard throughout, even in less public areas.

The central book stack has a frame of T-plan vertical and double C-plan horizontal structural steels, visible at the lowest levels, with concrete floors and six internal staircases clad in steel panels (now encased in breeze blocks for fire protection). Original steel fittings remain, including map presses and several carrels, the latter included at the insistence of a minority group on the original design committee. An ingenious paternoster book conveyor runs continuously through the 11 vertical storeys of the book stack, then turns and runs horizontally along a subterranean tunnel leading to the main Bodleian Library.

The building was designed in response to a severe shortage of book storage space at the Bodleian Library. Creating a new block capable of housing 5 million volumes while remaining within close reach of the centrally located reading rooms, opposite the very heart of historic Oxford, posed a major challenge for the architect. Scott's response was to design a part-sunken library in his characteristic 'middle line' idiom, which fused modern and traditional elements. As The Builder remarked in August 1940, 'the building will appeal as a nice blend of traditional Oxford with modern tendencies, in which the choice of local Bladon stone with Clipsham dressings considerably assists'. Scott had previously designed the University Library for Cambridge (1931-34). The New Bodleian was built by Benfield & Loxley of Oxford. The Indian Institute Library on the top floor was added in 1966-68 to the designs of Robert Potter.