Inside the Maughan Library: King's College's Gothic Archive-Turned-Reading-Room

It had rained overnight, and Chancery Lane still had that slick, mirror-black look when I turned off Fleet Street on the Saturday morning Open House London opened its doors for another year. I'd walked past the Maughan Library dozens of times without ever going in – it's the kind of building that looks so obviously important, so obviously not for you, that you assume there's a King's College ID card check at the door and keep walking. For one weekend a year, there isn't. You just walk up the steps under the Gothic arch, past the red Open House flag snapping in the wind, and in.

A building with more lives than the books it holds

The Maughan Library sits on ground that has been doing important, secretive work for nearly 800 years, long before anyone thought to put a reading room under a glass dome. In 1232, Henry III founded the Domus Conversorum, a home for Jewish converts to Christianity, on this exact spot. After Edward I expelled the Jewish community from England in 1290, the site passed to the Master of the Rolls, the judge who kept the records of the Court of Chancery, and its chapel became the Rolls Chapel, rebuilt at one point by Inigo Jones. Centuries of legal paperwork piled up here before anyone built somewhere proper to keep it.

That "somewhere proper" arrived in the 1850s, when the architect Sir James Pennethorne, who had inherited John Nash's practice, was commissioned to design a permanent home for the nation's records. Work started in 1851 and dragged on in phases for decades – John Taylor added the Chancery Lane frontage between 1891 and 1896, and in the process reused a genuine thirteenth-century archway salvaged from the old Rolls Chapel. So the building you see today is really several buildings stitched together across half a century, unified by one very unusual brief.

The strongbox of the Empire

That brief was fire. The Palace of Westminster had burned down in 1834, and the fear of losing the nation's legal and historical records the same way shaped every decision Pennethorne made. The Public Record Office, as it was then called, became known as the "strongbox of the Empire," and it earned the name: each storeroom was self-contained and lit only from outside, so a fire in one cell couldn't spread to the next. Shelves were slate, not wood. Doors were cast iron, some reportedly as heavy as a small car, hung on frames thick enough to survive a siege.

Walking through, you can still feel that logic in the bones of the place even where the fittings have gone. The rooms are boxy and self-contained in a way no architect designing a library from scratch would choose. Corridors turn at odd angles. There's a compartmentalised, almost cellular quality to parts of the building that has nothing to do with aesthetics and everything to do with keeping eight centuries of Chancery paperwork from going up in smoke.

One guide on the tour told us library staff nicknamed the building "Alcatraz" back when it was cold, unheated, and full of buckets catching drips – which is a strange thing to hear standing in a warm, sunlit reading room with people quietly working on laptops.

From records office to reading room

The Public Record Office moved out to Kew in the late 1990s, once its collection had outgrown Chancery Lane, and King's College London bought the empty building in 2001. What followed was a genuinely difficult renovation: no heating, no wiring for modern lighting, floors chopped into rooms barely bigger than a domestic bedroom, and severe restrictions on what could be touched at all given the building's Grade II* listed status.

The architects Gaunt Francis Associates had to fit 750,000 items, roughly 1,250 study spaces, a rare books room with its own climate control, a café, lifts, and modern security into a Victorian fortress that was never meant to hold any of it.

The renovation cost around £40 million and took about two years. It reopened as the Maughan Library in 2002, named after Sir Deryck Maughan, a King's alumnus and businessman whose gift helped fund the project. What I find genuinely impressive, seeing it in person, is how little the solution looks like a compromise.

The original cast-iron doors, removed from their frames, now hang beside the archways as if still open. The slate that once lined the storerooms was reused to clad the new doorways. Two of the original record cells were kept exactly as they were – bare, dim, still smelling faintly of old stone – as a kind of memory of what the building used to be before it became a library at all.

Under the dome

The reason everyone actually queues up for this one, though, is the Round Reading Room, and I understand why the second I stepped through the doors into it. It's a dodecagonal room – twelve-sided – modelled loosely on the old Reading Room at the British Museum, ringed by tiered galleries of dark wood and iron railings that climb three storeys toward a domed glass ceiling. Every level is packed floor to ceiling with books, spines catching the light from a ring of lamps arranged in a great brass sunburst pattern over the central desks.

On a bright morning, the glass dome pulls in enough daylight that half the room barely needs its lamps at all, though most were lit anyway, giving everything a warm, low glow that has nothing to do with a normal university library and everything to do with a Victorian public building that was designed to be looked at.

What struck me most was how lived-in it felt. This wasn't a museum piece roped off for visitors – there were students at the round tables working through the weekend, laptops open, headphones in, apparently unbothered by a steady trickle of Open House visitors circling the balcony with their phones out.

It's rare to get to see a heritage building actually doing its job rather than being preserved as a static thing to admire, and the contrast between the room's grandeur and its very ordinary daily use is, I think, the best argument for why King's fought so hard to make this conversion work rather than knocking the whole thing down for something more practical.

The clock tower, the courtyard, and a very old crest

Outside, the building keeps doing the thing Victorian civic architecture does best, which is show off just enough to be interesting without tipping into gaudiness. The Chancery Lane facade is Pennethorne and Taylor's Gothic Revival at full volume: ranks of pointed arch windows, a clock tower added in 1865 that originally doubled as an emergency water tank in case of fire, and small carved figures tucked into niches that most passers-by never look up to see.

Around the side, a vaulted stone archway leads through to an internal courtyard, its ribs meeting at a central boss below a heraldic shield carved directly into the stone. It's the kind of detail you'd walk straight past on an ordinary day and stop dead in front of on an Open House weekend, phone camera tilted up, holding up the queue behind you.

That's really the value of the festival in one image. Nothing about the archway changed between the Tuesday before and the Saturday I visited – it's been there for well over a century – but Open House gives you permission to actually stop and look at it, rather than treating it as scenery on the way to Chancery Lane tube station.

Why Open House London still matters

I say this every year I write one of these posts, but it bears repeating: London is full of buildings like this, ones that are technically accessible if you have the right card, the right job, or the right reason to be there, and functionally invisible to everyone else. Open House Festival, now stretching across more than a week each September rather than the single weekend it started as decades ago, is one of the few times that access gets flattened. You don't need a King's ID card.

You don't need to be doing research. You just need to turn up, and for the Maughan Library that meant a self-guided route through the Round Reading Room plus, this year, the chance to hear Terence Gower's sound installation "Enemies and Rascals" tucked into one of the original record cells – a strange, quiet, very fitting use of a room that used to hold nothing but paper and silence.

Visiting the Maughan Library

The Maughan Library sits at Chancery Lane, WC2A 1LR, a short walk from Chancery Lane and Temple underground stations, or a slightly longer one from Charing Cross if you're coming by train. During Open House Festival it's typically a drop-in, self-guided visit rather than a timed tour, so there's no need to book in advance – though it's worth checking the current year's programme on the Open House Festival website, since format and opening hours do shift slightly year to year.

Outside of the festival, access is generally restricted to King's College London students, staff, and University of London card holders, along with SCONUL Access Card holders and members of the public with a genuine research need, so this is very much a once-a-year window for the rest of us.

Go in the morning if you can. The Round Reading Room's dome does something genuinely different with the light depending on the time of day, and an early visit means fewer people between you and a clear view up through the galleries. Wear shoes with some grip, too – September in London means a decent chance of the same rain-slicked cobbles I got on the walk over.

Once you're done, the building sits in exactly the right neighbourhood to keep going. The Royal Courts of Justice and Temple Church are both a few minutes' walk away and often open the same Open House weekend, Lincoln's Inn's usually-hidden gardens and halls are close by, and Sir John Soane's Museum on Lincoln's Inn Fields is one of those places worth the short detour regardless of what time of year it is.

Chancery Lane isn't a part of London people tend to wander through for fun, but for one week a year it might be one of the best-stocked stretches of the whole festival.

_______________________

Did you enjoy this article? If you'd like to contribute to the running costs of WithinLondon, click the button below:

All photos were taken by Ina/WithinLondon, unless stated otherwise.