Qualla: Guildhall Library

Guildhall Library: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Garry Knight from London, England, CC BY 2.0. Around 1425, on the south side of the Guildhall Chapel, a fair and large library opened to students of scripture, the gift of a dying merchant. The merchant was Richard Whittington, the same Dick Whittington of pantomime fame, four-time Lord Mayor of London. His will provided the funds, and the Town Clerk John Carpenter, working with John Coventry, brought a public library into being for one of the first times anywhere in England. It would not last. By 1549, the entire collection had been carted away by a duke, and 300 years would pass before another library appeared at Guildhall. Today, the present library holds an unbroken run of the London Gazette from 1665, trade directories going back to 1677, and the kind of seventeenth-century pamphlets that bring scholars from across the world. Whittington's idea, in other words, eventually came back.

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Image: Garry Knight from London, England | CC BY 2.0

Guildhall Library: The Whittington Library

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The wub, CC BY-SA 4.0. The historian John Stow, walking London in the 1590s for his Survey of London, described what was then a memory: "a fair and large library, furnished with books, pertaining to the Guildhall and college." Stow recorded what had happened to it. During the reign of Edward VI, around...

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Image: The wub | CC BY-SA 4.0

Guildhall Library: The Second Founding

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit PAUL FARMER, CC BY-SA 2.0. Three centuries passed before the City of London Corporation tried again. In 1824 they appointed a committee to consider "a Library of all matters relating to this City, the Borough of Southwark, and the County of Middlesex," funded out of the Privy Purse rather than the rates. T...

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Image: PAUL FARMER | CC BY-SA 2.0

Guildhall Library: What the Bombs Took

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ethan Doyle White, CC BY-SA 4.0. On the night of 29 to 30 December 1940, German incendiary bombs fell across the City of London. The Blitz that night destroyed dozens of churches, livery halls, and warehouses. At Guildhall Library, around 25,000 volumes were lost when some of the storerooms burned. The library b...

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Image: Ethan Doyle White | CC BY-SA 4.0

Guildhall Library: What's Inside

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Robert Lamb, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Guildhall Library now holds what may be the deepest collection of London-specific reference material anywhere. There is a complete run of the London Gazette from 1665 to the present, capturing royal proclamations, bankruptcy notices, and military dispatches across 360 years o...

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Image: Robert Lamb | CC BY-SA 2.0

Guildhall Library: The Modern Reading Room

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit R Sones, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1926 the librarians devised the London Classification, a bespoke system for arranging material about the city, and that scheme is still used today, including by the Barbican Library's London Collection for items available to borrow. In 2009 and 2010, the Prints and Maps and Ma...

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Image: R Sones | CC BY-SA 2.0