Airtight and run by robots: British Library’s National Newspaper Building opens

A new £23m long-term home for the British Library’s newspaper collection has officially opened in Boston Spa, West Yorkshire.

Designed by Atkins and built by Kier, with Capita providing project and cost management, the building will provide protected storage for three quarters of a billion newspaper pages – the equivalent of 12.5 million copies of Construction Manager.

Built to replace the collection’s previous home in a 1930s building in Colindale, north London, the National Newspaper Building was designed to provide the ideal environmental conditions in which to store millions of old newspapers.

The almost airtight storage rooms are kept at a constant temperature and humidity, in a low-oxygen environment to eliminate the risk of fire, on high-density racking 20m high.

When required, robotic cranes retrieve and transfer the newspapers via an airlock to a retrieval area where staff can remove requested items and send them either to the British Library newsroom at St Pancras or the on-site reading room at Boston Spa.

The building forms part of a wider £33m programme to move, preserve and provide access to the newspaper collection

“Across the centuries, the British public have always had a voracious appetite for newspapers – they form the record of the nation’s memory at local, regional and national level,” said Roly Keating, chief executive of the British Library.

“The National Newspaper Building is a spectacular example of the Library fulfilling that purpose and striking a vital balance between meeting the needs of researchers today and our duty to preserve this priceless collection for future generations.”

The building forms part of a wider £33m programme to move, preserve and provide access to the newspaper collection which included a full upgrade of the catalogue records, the construction of the newsroom at St Pancras and the refurbishment of the reading room at Boston Spa.

Part of British Library’s northern campus, the National Newspaper Building stands alongside the Aktins-designed Additional Storage Building which was completed in 2009.