Senate House and Its Library: Orwell's Ministry of Truth, and How to Get Inside

Senate House is the white tower that rears up behind the British Museum and looks, from certain angles on Malet Street, like it is about to arrest you. It was designed by Charles Holden, built between 1932 and 1937, and it is nineteen floors and 210 feet of Portland stone. Which for a while made it one of the tallest secular buildings in London. It belongs to the University of London, it has been Grade II* listed since 1969, and most of it is library.

It is also the most quietly sinister building in London, and that is not an accident of mood – it has the history to earn it. Here is what happened in it, what is inside it, and the part most guides get wrong: you do not have to wait for Open House to get in.

Holden's Portland stone, chosen because it washes itself clean.

Was Senate House Really Orwell's Ministry of Truth?

Yes – and the connection is far more direct than "it is said to have inspired", which is how you usually see it phrased. During the Second World War, Senate House was requisitioned as the Ministry of Information: the department that ran British propaganda and censorship. Orwell's first wife, Eileen, worked in its Censorship Department. He knew exactly what went on in that building, from somebody who went there every day.

So the Ministry of Truth appears in Nineteen Eighty-Four as an enormous white pyramid of glittering concrete, rising terrace by terrace above the rooftops. He was describing a building whose lobby his wife walked through. Graham Greene got a novel out of it too – The Ministry of Fear, in 1943. One wartime office block, two of the defining paranoid novels in English.

Why Does It Look Like That?

Charles Holden is the architect behind the best of the interwar Underground stations, and the same instincts are at work here: clean masses, almost no ornament, and a lot of confidence. He chose Portland stone for a specific and rather charming reason – he reckoned it was the only stone that washes itself, which mattered enormously in a London that still burned coal.

What you see is also only the beginning of what was meant to be there. Holden's scheme ran nearly 1,200 feet across the whole site, and the money ran out. Senate House and the library wing are the fragment that got built, which is why the tower can feel as though it has been cut off mid-sentence.

Nineteen floors of it, and it was supposed to be bigger.

Can You Visit Senate House Library?

You can, and you do not need to be a student – which is the thing worth knowing, because almost everything written about Senate House treats Open House as the only way in. Senate House Library sells day tickets to members of the public, which gets you into the reading rooms on an ordinary weekday. Check the University of London's library pages for the current price and what you need to bring, and note that the historic special collections are consulted by appointment rather than pulled off a shelf.

Open House is still the best weekend to come if what you want is the building rather than the books. The ceremonial rooms that are not part of a normal library visit tend to open then. My guide to Open House London has the rest of that weekend in it, and the Maughan Library is the other university reading room worth queueing for.

What Is Actually in Senate House Library?

The library occupies floors four to eighteen, with the public reading rooms on four to seven, and holds around three million volumes – including some 120,000 printed before 1851. It grew out of the University of London Library, founded in the nineteenth century, so the collection is a great deal older than the building around it.

The special collections are where it gets strange. There is the Goldsmiths' Library of Economic Literature, a palaeography room full of western European manuscripts, the University's own archives. And the Harry Price Library of Magical Literature, assembled by the ghost-hunter and psychic investigator Harry Price. Conjuring, witchcraft, spiritualism, the lot. A national collection of magic, fifteen floors up a building that ran wartime censorship, in a tower that gave Orwell the Ministry of Truth. There is no other library in London with that combination.

What Has Been Filmed at Senate House?

A great deal, and almost always as somewhere official and slightly menacing, which tells you everything about how the building reads on camera. Both of Christopher Nolan's first two Batman films used it – Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises – along with No Time to Die, Spy Game and Fast & Furious 6.

On television it has turned up in Killing Eve and, further back, Jeeves and Wooster and the 1981 Day of the Triffids. The 1984 film of Nineteen Eighty-Four shot here too, which closes the circle rather neatly.

It also appeared in Ian McKellen's Richard III in 1995 – the same film that used the old Midland Grand at St Pancras as King Edward's palace. If you want to understand what London looks like when a director wants fascism, those two buildings are the shortlist.

📍 Where: Senate House, Malet Street, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 7HU.

🚇 Getting there: Russell Square and Goodge Street are both about five minutes' walk; Euston and Euston Square are ten.

🎫 Admission: The library sells day tickets to the public – check the current terms on the University of London site before you travel. Special collections are by appointment.

📅 Open days: Open House, each September, is when the parts of the building that are not library tend to open. Dates change yearly.

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