From January 2025, Gladstone’s Library will be changing the Reading Room opening hours. Currently the Reading Rooms are open daily from 9am-10pm; this will be changing to our historic opening hours of 9am-5pm for Readers and Researchers, with Residents continuing to have access from 9am-10pm.
As regular visitors will know, access for everyone until 10pm is a relatively recent innovation. For much of the Library’s history the Reading Rooms were only ever open to residential guests; when they were opened to Day Readers in the late 1990s/early 2000s, Readers left at 5pm, allowing the Library to return to its residential mission until the Reading Rooms closed fully at 10pm.
When the Library re-opened after its Covid shutdown the opening hours were extended to 10pm for everyone, both to give the option of more space – crucial when social distancing was still mandatory – and to allow the Library to assess who was using the space, and when.
Three years on we have an informative picture of our demographic. We know that the majority of Readers visit between 9am-5pm. On an average day only a tiny number visit post-5pm, although these numbers rise dramatically around exam time. Keeping the Library building open so that the Reading Rooms can be accessed is challenging in a number of areas, including fire safety and general safeguarding. With visitor numbers much reduced in the aftermath of the pandemic, these challenges were manageable. But the Library is on course to welcome over 13,000 residential and day visitors in 2024; keeping all of those visitors safe while delivering the standard of welcome for which the Library is known is becoming very difficult to deliver across thirteen hours a day, every day.
In order to maximise space for everyone we will be reintroducing our historical opening hours from January 2025: 9am-5pm for Readers and Researchers, 9am-10pm for Residents, seven days a week.