Bromley House Library

exterior, Bromley House Library, Angel Row, Nottingham

The Bromley House Library (originally the Nottingham Subscription Library) is a subscription library in the United Kingdom.

Premises

The 'Standfast Library' in Bromley House Library, has a meridian line used to determine local solar noon.

The library is housed in Bromley House, a Georgian townhouse in the centre of Nottingham. This building is grade II* listed[1] and retains many original features. It was built in 1752 as a town house for George Smith, grandson of the founder of Smith's Bank, the oldest known provincial bank in the United Kingdom.

In the first-floor 'Standfast Library' is a Meridian Line, dating from 1836 and used to set clocks to Noon 'local' time in the days before Railway time or Greenwich Mean Time was introduced as the British standard. The longcase clock in the room is still set to Nottingham time, 4 minutes and 33 seconds slower than Greenwich.

History

The library was founded in 1816 at Carlton Street. In April 1820, Bromley House was offered for sale by auction and purchased by the library for £2,750 (equivalent to £198,243 in 2015).[2] The library moved in in 1825.[3]

In the 19th century the library had around a hundred subscribers, including George Green and Edward Bromhead. Historically, the first name on the list of subscribers was the Duke of Newcastle as Lord Lieutenant of the county.

Library services

A view of the main room. The spiral staircase is unusual in that it has no central supporting column.

As of January 2015 the library has over 1,300 members who pay an annual subscription. Items on loan are still recorded using a manual ledger system where each member has their own page. The library has a stock of over 40,000 books (expanding by 700-800 each year) which includes a good selection of interest to local historians, and a wide selection of 19th and 20th century novels. It also contains more modern items such as audiobooks and CDs. The Heritage Lottery Fund contributed towards a project to create the library's computer catalogue 'Bromcat'. This involved a team of staff and volunteers cataloguing the entire contents over a two year period, completing the work in 2013.

Librarians

References

  1. ↑ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-35831853
  2. ↑ UK CPI inflation numbers based on data available from Gregory Clark (2016), "The Annual RPI and Average Earnings for Britain, 1209 to Present (New Series)" MeasuringWorth.
  3. ↑ "Bromley House Library, One Hundred Years Old To-Day.". Nottingham Evening Post. British Newspaper Archive. 1 April 1916. Retrieved 9 September 2016 – via British Newspaper Archive. (subscription required (help)).
  4. ↑ "Bromley House Library Librarians 1819-1927". Bromley House Library. Retrieved 9 September 2016.

Further reading

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Coordinates: 52°57′13″N 1°09′09″W / 52.9536°N 1.1524°W / 52.9536; -1.1524

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