Sometimes history is preserved in the strangest of environments. Suburban streets with decommissioned Victorian drinking fountains, ancient churches nestled inside contemporary housing estates. Often heritage is seen as a sign of prestige, as boutique hotels conserve the features of an abandoned stately home along with all mod cons and banks ensure all the best security features are discreetly contained inside their colonnaded marble banking halls. Then there are those times when someone goes above and beyond not simply to preserve a space but even confound the context.
The example par excellence would be the committee room of Lloyds, inserted into Richard Rogers modernist temple to capitalism. The Shakespeare Memorial Room has been transported in all its wood-panelled and plastered splendour to the ninth floor of the new Birmingham Central Library. It’s a statement building, a distinctive shell that constantly makes itself felt in the sightlines of the city. It’s not quite as pervasive as the Faberge slug around New Street station, but the interlocking roundels punctuate the skyline and strangely make the city feel smaller. I’m not sure what the roundels are supposed to do apart from make the structure seem less substantial, but it’s echoed in the golden cylinder that crowns the building.
The aim of the Shakespeare Memorial Library was to collect a copy of every edition and piece of writing about Shakespeare. That is what is contained in the golden cylinder and I can only presume it can be built up like Lego as the collection expands. The Shakespeare Memorial Room is something like a portal to the collection. It’s certainly a sort of portal to the past. It was built as part of the 1882 Central Library, was eventually transferred to the Conservatoire and now finds itself observing over the city. The books and artefacts here now feel suitably dusty; they aren’t the treasures but some of the ephemera between some explanatory panels. It’s a bit of an exhibit, a bit of a retreat, it doesn’t really seem to serve any purpose except to be there and in that way to me it exemplifies all that can be wonderful about the arts. Endless tiresome debates about whether we should fund libraries, what education should be for, the value of socially-engaged arts projects. Sometimes it’s just important to treasure something for the sake of it and to retain those things that have an unspoken significance for us in order not to deprive the future of their pleasure.
This is brought home most forcibly when you emerge from the room and look out over the cityscape, where currently a hole has been ripped in to the landscape by the eradication of the Ziggurat, one of the most striking English post-war buildings and one that gave Birmingham something truly distinctive. The new development, deliberately bland and passive, will also come to pass. As may this room. I suspect what it stands for, a love of Shakespeare and a connexion through the generations, will last longer than the interventions in the city.
http://www.libraryofbirmingham.com/article/shakespearelibrary/shakespearememorialroom
@LibraryofBham
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