Library & Archive Architects

A library gathers what a community knows and makes it available to future readers. That is an enduring obligation. The building's role is to keep books in stable conditions, to give readers daylight, warmth and quiet to stay for hours, and to leave room for the collection to grow. Many of the libraries we work on sit within listed buildings, and we attend to the building with the same care as the collections it protects.

Our appointments range from feasibility studies and options appraisals through to full design and delivery. We begin by understanding the collection, how it is used and how it needs to be protected, and design storage, environmental control and reader spaces around these requirements.

At the University of Oxford, our refurbishment of the Jackson Library at Exeter College, designed by George Gilbert Scott in 1857, increased reader spaces from 52 to 88 and made the Grade II listed building fully accessible for the first time. A 14-metre cantilevered oak balcony adds study space in a new reading room and reveals the once hidden qualities of Scott's buildings.

At the British Museum we are renewing the Round Reading Room, where Darwin, Dickens, Marx and Woolf once came to work. Nearby, we are refurbishing the Sanskrit Library, the surviving section of the museum's original Long Room, where a new roof and lanterns will create a more stable environment for the collection and reduce heat loss by 57 per cent.

For the RAF Museum, our National Archive and Library brings 140,000 books and 46,000 objects together for the first time, in storage designed to international standards and open to researchers and visitors alike. For the Architectural Association in London, we designed a specialist architectural bookshop within a Grade I listed building. At Homerton College, Cambridge, we designed a rotunda reading room for the college's collection of rare children's books at the centre of a new entrance building and exhibition gallery.

We work alongside librarians, archivists and conservators from the first briefing, and with the estates teams responsible for the buildings. The senior people you meet at the start see the project through.

The Jackson Library was named RIBA South Building of the Year and Conservation Project of the Year in 2025.