Bromley House Library (originally the Nottingham Subscription Library) is a

subscription library A subscription library (also membership library or independent library) is a library that is financed by private funds either from membership fees or endowments. Unlike a public library, access is often restricted to members, but access rights c ...

Nottingham Nottingham ( , locally ) is a city and unitary authority area in Nottinghamshire, East Midlands, England. It is located north-west of London, south-east of Sheffield and north-east of Birmingham. Nottingham has links to the legend of Robi ...

Premises

The library is situated in Bromley House, a Georgian townhouse in Nottingham city centre. This building is grade II* listed and retains many original features. It was built in 1752 as his town house by

Sir George Smith, 1st Baronet Sir George Smith, 1st Baronet (1714-1769) of Smith House (later " Bromley House"), Angel Row, Nottingham and of Stoke Hall in the parish of East Stoke in Nottinghamshire, was a member of the Smith family of bankers, who established Smith's Ban ...

(1714-1769) of Stoke Hall, East Stoke, Nottinghamshire, a grandson of the founder of Smith's Bank in Nottingham, the oldest known provincial bank in the United Kingdom. He used part as an office for transacting his lucrative business as Collector of the Land Tax. In 1929 Evans, Clark and Woollatt added a new doorway and frontage, allowing the ground floor to be converted for retail use. In the first-floor 'Standfast Library' is a meridian line, dating from 1836 and used to set clocks to Noon 'local' time in the days before railway time or

Greenwich Mean Time Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is the mean solar time at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, counted from midnight. At different times in the past, it has been calculated in different ways, including being calculated from noon; as a co ...

was introduced as the British standard. The longcase clock in the room is still set to Nottingham time, 4 minutes and 33 seconds behind Greenwich. In the attics, Alfred Barber opened the first photographic studio in the Midlands on 2 October 1841. Started 1 April 2019 a major refurbishment project comprising new roof, sympathetically restored attic rooms and essential internal repairs partially funded by a grant from Historic England East Midlands. The refurbished roof was completed in October 2019.

History

The Nottingham Subscription Library was founded on 1 April 1816 at Carlton Street. In April 1820, Bromley House was offered for sale by auction and purchased by the library for £2,750 (). The library moved in during 1821. In the 19th century the library had around one hundred subscribers, including George Green and Edward Bromhead. Historically, the first name on the list of subscribers was the Duke of Newcastle as Lord Lieutenant of the county.

Library services

Bromley House Library (geograph 4066502)

had 1,638 members who paid an annual subscription. Items on loan are still recorded using a manual ledger system where each member has their own page. The library has a stock of just under 50,000 books (expanding by 700-800 each year) which includes a good selection of interest to local historians, and a wide selection of 19th and 20th century novels. It also holds

audiobook An audiobook (or a talking book) is a recording of a book or other work being read out loud. A reading of the complete text is described as "unabridged", while readings of shorter versions are abridgements. Spoken audio has been available in sch ...

s and CDs. The

Heritage Lottery Fund The National Lottery Heritage Fund, formerly the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), distributes a share of National Lottery funding, supporting a wide range of heritage projects across the United Kingdom. History The fund's predecessor bodies were ...

contributed towards a project to create the library's computer catalogue 'Bromcat'. This involved a team of staff and volunteers cataloguing the entire contents over a two-year period, completing the work in 2013.

Librarians

*William Hardy 1816 – 1819 *Valentine Kirk 1819 – 1820 *James Archer 1820 – 1834 *John Walton 1834 – 1857 *Count Ubaldo Marioni 1857 – 1865 *John Cummings Banwell 1867 – 1893 *J William Moore 1893 – 1899 *Arthur Lineker 1899 – 1926

References

External links