National Treasures

Like the Library of Congress (where I interned waaaay back in 1990), the British Library is both a research library and the official national depository. Everything printed (or published to the internet) in Britain is archived here. The library receives as many as 8,000 new items every day--every newpaper, book, comic, stamp, postcard, and dirty magazine.

We had a tour of the Treasures room, which exhibited such famous works as a Gutenberg Bible, the Magna Carta, and some of the earliest published Shakespeare. No photos were allowed in the Library, but they have a great website where many of the treasures can be viewed online. (More here: Austen, Blake, Lewis Carrol's original Alice manuscript, Handel's Messiah, and about 30,000 other things.)

We also registered for reader cards and many of us requested materials in the reading rooms. The British Library is not a lending library; everything has to be used on site and with fairly strict rules. For example, no pens, highlighters or cameras could be taken in the reading rooms. My next big project will be about Beatrix Potter, so I reserved a biography and a guide to an exhibit of her work. My British Library card is good for a year, but it seems unlikely that I'll ever use it again.

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I stopped by King's Cross Station this morning.

Do you know where I was going?

That's right. I tried to catch the Hogwarts Express.

"Behind the magic."

 Like much of London, King's Cross is undergoing major renovations. The Olympics opens exactly one year from yesterday and everyone here is hyper-aware of the "eyes of the world" being focused on their city. At one point, not long ago, the Platform 9 3/4 photo opportunity was actually in a quiet corner of the station. Now it is in a tiny alcove off the street. It was still busy.

Lit Rally

Today we took a most literary excursion--to the city of Oxford. Let's see if we can count all the sites that figure into kids lit.

 

We caught the train from Paddington Station, immortalized in the stories about Paddington Bear. They sell Paddington Bear merch at the train station, complete with rain jacket and wellies. The statue, however, shows him with just a hat and tag. "Please take care of this bear. Thank you."

Photo by carmen_seaby on Flickr. Creative commons license.

The train to Oxford takes an hour. Once there, we headed to the Bodleian Library, Oxford University. The library was originally started with a bequest of 280 books in the early 15th Century (a huge jump from the 20 owned by the university previously). We got to see the oldest part of the library, where scholars used to use the resources while standing up, with the books actually chained to the desks. For average tourists like ourselves, no photos were allowed in this area.

And the kids lit connection? Parts of the Harry Potter films were filmed here. The oldest area, Duke Humfrey's Library (with false walls hiding the real 15th/16th century manuscripts), was the restricted area of the library at Hogwarts. And the Divinity School was used as the site for the Hogwarts infirmary.

 

The Divinity School

From the Bodleian Library website. Lots of CGI went into these movies!

Next stop: Christ Church. I had no idea that Oxford University was comprised of 39 different colleges, each with their own campuses, libraries, and dining and residence halls. Christ Church is particularly famous because Charles Dodgson was a mathematics tutor there. Who? You know, Lewis Carroll! Alice Liddell, Wonderland's Alice, was the daughter of the college dean.

Alice wanted to know what lay beyond the wall that separated her backyard from the Cathedral Garden, so she'd look through the keyhole.

In the Cathedral Garden. Also known as the
Forbidden Garden, since Alice was not allowed to play here.

 

Looking back at the yard that Alice knew.

Illustration by John Tenniel.

Public domain, found using Google image search.

Christ Church (don't call it Christ Church College, for Christ's sake) was also a location for...Harry Potter!

The dining hall inspired the great hall at Hogwarts. The filmmakers found it better to build a replica on a sound stage rather than attempt to film on location, but it's quite a faithful representation, don't you think?

 

I also made it to Alice's Shop and The Story Museum. This museum is so new that they offer tours of the building, but it won't open to the public until 2014. Regardless, the concept is brilliant (as they say here) and will be a wonderful addition to the literary life of Oxford.