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Saturday 22 October 2011

'ooooh heaven is a place on earth'

St Deniol's Library
In the words of the old Belinda Carlisle song: 'ooooh heaven is a place on earth'.
Or in this case, academic nerdy geek heaven, at least. 
I write this on a Virgin train heading to 'Paradise'... St Deniol's Library in Hawarden, just inside the Welsh border and a mere 6 miles away from the loveliness that is Chester.
St Deniol's, or to give it its new name as of 2010 'Gladstone's Library', is the UK's only residential library, and was created and given to the nation by that most impressive of Victorian statesmen William Gladstone.  Gladstone, an avid book lover, had collected about 32 000 books over the course of his rather long life and the library has considerably more these days.

My secondary thesis supervisor and I were having lunch yesterday and she described St D's as a type of 'academic boot camp'.
And so I'm off to boot camp to craft and polish the current chapter I've been working on... living in a library filled with over 200 000 books.
Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!! :)

4 comments:

spotthegerbil said...

200,000 books, but I bet they don't have a copy of "Fly Fishing" by J.R. Hartley...

Mrs Gerbil said...

That looks AMAZING. It looks exactly how a library should look. Almost makes doing a PhD look appealing just to have an excuse to stay!!!
Enjoy.

Nik said...

Spot, you're correct, no 'fly fishing' :)
Mrs G - I know! I know! I'm sitting in amongst all the books now going 'squeeeee!' - very quietly, you understand ;p

Freda said...

It's a wonderful place to have a sabbatical or study break. I had a very happy week there around 1999 - hope you enjoy it and find it useful. It's an amazing place and the staff are great.