In the environs of the British Museum

The Museum Tavern on the corner of Museum Street, designed by Victorian architect William Finch Hill. Many writers have drunk in this pub, including J.B. Priestley, George Orwell, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Karl Marx (who wrote Das Kapital in the Reading Room of the Museum and was so poor he used to wash his clothes in the sinks in the lavatories – despite being such an expert economist, his personal finances were a mess!).

Museum Street runs from the British Museum down to New Oxford Street and beyond. In his novel The Devil Doctor Sax Rohmer invented an antique shop called Salaman’s in Museum Street. If you touched a small Buddha statue in Salaman’s a flight of steps would appear that led down to a chamber hiding the fiendish Dr Fu Manchu.

Virginia Woolf referred to Museum Street in her third novel Jacob’s Room saying with typical ambiguity: “When one walks down that street opposite the British Museum – what's it called? – that's what I mean. It's all like that”. Jacob’s Room was written in 1922. To my mind it’s about the loss of innocence. We see the subject of the novel (Jacob) aged 19, on the eve of the First World War. We see him working as a student in the Reading Room of the British Museum, talking to friends, falling in love. He travels across Europe and sees the acropolis in Athens by starlight. We (the readers) know that in a few months’ time Jacob’s easy liberal world will be destroyed. Not just for Jacob, but for millions of 19-year-olds. Virginia Woolf may have intended the novel to be a memorial to her friend the young poet Rupert Brooke who died while serving in the Royal Navy during the First World War.

When I was at university in my second year I had a summer job (lasted about six weeks) in the old Reading Room at the British Museum. I worked down in the stacks, which comprised a subterranean warren connected by cast iron spiral staircases. Each team of five library assistants had its own little room to gather in. Requests for books arrived in batches and were handed out by the team supervisor. You would then go off with a trolley and collect the books and send them up by special lifts. You could take as long as you liked to do this. There was an old chap who had been there years and showed me the ropes (“If you can’t find a particular book don’t waste time looking for it, just write on the chit Destroyed in the war and chuck it back at them”). In the long periods when we had nothing to do we read books we had picked off the shelves. Pornographic books were locked away and were looked after by a special team (they were full-time staff, no students allowed). I was once called to the Director’s office, along with one of the other temp Library Assistants (Frances Westaway) to collect some books. We went into the historic Kings Library (part of the Museum’s galleries) and had to knock on a door that was disguised as a false wall of books. “That figures” said Frances, “he lives in a bookcase!”

Also in the environs of the British Museum is Montague Street where the University of London uses some of the 18th century terraced houses as student accommodation. During the summer these student rooms are rented out to tourists, but one year (the summer I was working at the Reading Room), for some obscure reason, they were left empty. Marie-Astrid managed to borrow the key to one of these rooms (she had a friend who lived there in term time) and stayed there for weeks without being discovered, while working as a temp in the West End. I used to go and see her after I had finished work. The room was tiny and we only had the bed to sit on. We had to be very quiet (and only talk in whispers).