QYPE*

Located on the Euston Road, the modern building of the British Library is somewhat overshadowed by the splendour of St Pancras station next door. Conceived in 1975 to replace the hopelessly inadequate facilities located at the British Museum site in Bloomsbury, it wasn't until 1997 that the building was completed.

The building itself is a curious architectural mix: red-brick facades, sloping grey roofs and groups of projecting balconies give it a curiously retiring appearance for such a major public building: the overall effect is a bit like a fortified Tesco. But there's no denying the quality of its execution, and if the outside disappoints, the inside impresses, with a generous scale - open spaces, wide staircases, spacious reading rooms - that works rather better.

Of course, it's the collection you're likely to want to see. As one of the world's largest libraries, together with its other sites, it holds some 150 million items and 25 million books, as well as manuscripts, theses, stamps - you name it. All on a staggering 625km of shelves. (Technically, this makes it the second largest in the world after the Library of Congress in the USA, although it actually has more items).

The galleries have a mixture of permanent collections and temporary exhibitions: highlights of the former have to include Magna Carter (they actually have two copies dated 1215) and the magnificent illuminated Lindisfarne Gospels, dating from the turn of the 7th century. Items from abroad include the Diamond Sutra, (the world's oldest dated printed book - 868AD), two Gutenberg Bibles and manscripts by Mozart, Mahler and JS Bach, among others.

The library is a good place to visit as, despite its treaures, it is not much visited by tourists compared with other museums, so you can take your time without being jostled. Of course, its major use is for research, and whatever your interest, its online collections are worth looking at. The web-site isn't that user-friendly, but persevere and the range of collections you can view is staggering (tens of millions of items).