A Visit to London’s Evangelical Library

Last Saturday I was able to spend the best part of the day at the Evangelical Library near Baker Street Station in London. Founded in the 1930’s by Geoffrey Williams the library holds over 80,000 books, plus numerous journals and periodicals. It was this collection of journals that prompted me to renew my membership after an interval of around 15 years and make the trip into the city centre.

I have to say that I was both impressed and slightly saddened by the experience. It was wonderful to be able to search through the journal room, buried deep within the library, which contains thousands of bound journal volumes, many dating from the 1800’s. The picture to the right and below left show the journal room. What saddened me was that such a great resource seems to be greatly under-used. Many of the recent journals I looked at seemed never to have been opened before. Like many Christian institutions the library appears to run on a shoe-string and does not have the resources to replace its ailing photocopier. Indeed the copies it produced were so poor that I bought a small scanner to work on my laptop computer and took that along. I am looking forward to spending another Saturday exploring the journal room later in the year. During the day I was able to scan quite a number of articles which will be appearing on-line in due course.

If you live within travelling distance of London I would highly recommend a visit. The library also offers a useful postal service for those who live further afield. Such resources deserve our support and should not be allowed to fall into disuse.