Bromley House Library
The Bromley House Library (originally the Nottingham Subscription Library) is a subscription library in the United Kingdom. It was founded in 1816 at Carlton Street and moved to its present location at Bromley House on Angel Row in the centre of Nottingham in 1822. This building is grade II* listed[1] and was built in 1752 as a town house for George Smith, grandson of the founder of Smith's Bank, the oldest known provincial bank in the United Kingdom.
In the 19th century the library had around a 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. 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 was introduced as the British standard. The longcase clock in the room is still set to Nottingham time, 4 minutes and 33 seconds slower than Greenwich.
As of January 2015 the library has over 1,300 members who pay 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 over 40,000 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 contains more modern items such as audiobooks and CDs. The Heritage Lottery Fund 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.
References
Further reading
- Coope, Rosalys (1991). 'Bromley House 1752 - 1991. Four essays celebrating the 175th Anniversary of the foundation of the Nottingham Subscription Library. Nottingham: Nottingham Subscription Library. ISBN 0-9517499-0-0.
External links
Coordinates: 52°57′13″N 1°09′09″W / 52.9536°N 1.1524°W