The British Library is the UK's national library and it holds over 150 million items in all known languages which include books, maps, stamps and audio recordings. It is a legal deposit library which means it receives every single book published or distributed in the UK and Ireland - some 3 million a year. With a total of 25 million books it is second only to the American Library of Congress in terms of volume.

Important books on display at the free gallery include the Magna Carta, Captain Cook's journal, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Geoffrey Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales', 'Beowulf', Virginia Woolf's 'Mrs Dalloway', Lewis Carroll's 'Alice's Adventures Under Ground', Jane Austen's 'History of England', Rudyard Kipling's 'Just So Stories, Thomas Malory's 'Le Morte Darthur' (King Arthur) and Charles Dickens' 'Nicholas Nickleby'.

The current building has been home to the Library since 1997 - before that the collections were scattered across London and also West Yorkshire. The building was specifically designed for the Library by the architect Colin St. John Wilson and it was the largest public building built in the UK in the 20th century.

The large piazza has sculptures by Eduardo Paolozzi (a bronze statue based on William Blake's study of Isaac Newton) and Antony Gormley (creator of the Angel in the North).

The King's Library is enclosed by a four-story glass tower in the middle of the building with 65,000 printed volumes along with other pamphlets, manuscripts and maps collected by King George III between 1763 and 1820.

The Library is open to everyone but a Reader Pass must be applied for to use the reading rooms. For those without passes the Library recently made over 30,000 images of their manuscripts available to download on the Internet while you can virtually leaf through Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks.

The British Library Sound Archive has over a million discs and 200,000 tapes documenting music, drama, literature, oral history and wildlife sounds from around the world. This too has an online archive with over 4,200 hours of content.

The Library's stamp collection was established in 1891 and its 80,000 items are arguably the best collection in the world.