Introduction

For the first hundred years of their history public libraries in Britain were draped in garb of the past.1 Until the beginning of what is conceptualised here as the long 1960s (see definition later in this chapter), the architectural treatment of Britain’s municipal public libraries – institutions which first appeared in the 1850s2 – was dominated by an eclecticism of revivalist styles, from Gothic, Classical and Georgian to Queen Anne, Renaissance and Tudorbethan, and sometimes freestyle permutations of these.3