Research in Westminster
Now that I’ve been bitten again by the writing bug, it’s good to explore other writing spaces and to research ideas. So this week I joined Westminster Libraries (one of them is a good research library too). Off to lovely Marylebone to collect my card and explore the facilities. The upstairs has an extensive research collection and study area and I sat for a while reading up on John Dickson Carr and locked room mysteries.
Then I hopped on the bus to Paddington to look in another of the borough’s libraries. All fab again. Both are in lovely old buildings. I shall look in the Charing Cross one and the Westminster Research Library this coming week or at the weekend (although I have an LSE lecture and a friend’s play on Saturday).
This is intriguing, too: Westminster’s Archives Centre is serialising an 1846 diary written by Nathaniel Bryceson, a Victorian clerk in Pimlico. His mother was born in 1797 and Nathaniel himself died in 1911. That’s just two generations crossing a very significant period of time. Incredible. I look forward to reading the entries.
When I left the library in Paddington, the day had become suddenly spring-like.
Gloucester Terrace, London W2
Porchester Square, London W2
[...] of our users has written a couple of posts about this on his own ‘London Lives’ blog: Research in Westminster and Writing Spaces). There’s also a long-running Writers’ Group which meets [...]
So you want to be an author? | Books & the City
23 September 2010 at 11:01
Hi thanks for mentioning my posts – the facilities at your libraries are great (I’m a she rather than a he, though)
Alex Urban
23 September 2010 at 13:27
[...] wrote about his diary in my Research in Westminster post (7 Feb 2010) [...]
Nathaniel Bryceson Lives On « London Lives
21 July 2010 at 13:10