THE WORST OF TIMES: TROUBLE AT THE BRITISH LIBRARY

Impoverished staff on strike. A devastating cyber attack. Multiple changes of leadership. Books poorly protected. Claudia Cockerell investigates a national treasure in crisis

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Librarians are the patron saints of hushed tones.

But on a grey December morning in King's Cross, the striking staff of the British Library are making a racket. Outside the entrance to the red brick library, around 130 employees chant in unison, blow on brightly coloured plastic horns and cheer when passing drivers honk in support. Money, Money, Money by ABBA blasts out of a surprisingly powerful portable speaker.

Yet beneath the jovial atmosphere is a sense of profound exasperation. "I don't want to be out here dancing on a picket line. I want to be in there, doing my job, and getting a decent wage for it," says one library assistant.

Inside the library, all is quiet. Its 11 reading rooms are closed for the week of the strike, leaving users to work on their laptops in the cafeterias or corridors. But regulars have grown used to disruption. The library is still recovering from a devastating cyber attack two years ago, which razed many of its core services to the ground.

With over 200 million items in its collection, The British Library's catalogue is the largest in the world. It includes Shakespeare's first folio, as well as curios like Jane Austen's glasses and a lock of Percy Shelley's hair. As one of six legal deposit libraries in the UK and Ireland, it also holds every book published on these isles since the 1600s. Its physical collection takes up more than 400 miles of shelves in the bowels of the King's Cross building and in Boston Spa, the library's robot-operated storage facility in Yorkshire.

In 2023, British Library executives published a manifesto called "Knowledge Matters", in which they set out a seven-year plan for growth and modernisation. Their stated "values" included a roll call of abstract nouns: openness, honesty, compassion, equality and fairness. Yet staff tell a story of gross mismanagement, woeful pay and an executive board who are completely out of touch with the day to day running of the library.