The city council’s planning committee has granted permission for the University Library’s new store on the Riverside site, which Council approved in September. Building work will begin in March 2027 and is expected to take about two years.
The store, a three-storey building beside the Riverside Library, will hold 610,000 volumes in mobile shelving, at a constant temperature and humidity, with room for twenty years’ growth. Most of the books now stand in three temporary stores in the city, one of which, in a former warehouse on Rendle Street, is to be sold. Readers will be able to order books from the store to any reading room, with deliveries twice a day.
When the store opens, the Old Library’s lower floors, which have held stack shelving since the floods of 1953 moved the books upstairs, will be converted to reading rooms. The building will cost £38.6 million, paid for from the University’s capital programme and the Library’s endowment.
“This is the first new building for the Library since 1996,” said Dr Hywel Prothero, the University Librarian. “It means our books will be kept properly for the first time in decades, and it gives the Old Library back to readers.”