The lasting legacy of the Story Garden

In 2019, the British Library invited the educational charity Global Generation to grow a garden on a patch of rubble in the shadow of its spires. The spot was hot and windy, surrounded by a barren urban landscape. But the charity had a vision, and with the help of residents from Somers Town, woodchip was laid down and planters were assembled. Even in this harsh environment, nature began to find a way through. 

The idea for the Story Garden was prompted by a new development of the British Library site, in partnership with Stanhope plc and Mitsui Fudosan (SMBL Developments Ltd). During the planning process, we found that our neighbours wanted more green space on their doorsteps, and decided to create a temporary garden while the extension was being built. Six years later, the Story Garden has blossomed into an oasis beloved by local people, 4,500 of whom visited it last year. 

Fifteen part-time staff run activities on the site, designed to welcome participants of all ages, from preschoolers to retirees. There’s an afterschool programme, cooking and gardening clubs and an annual camping trip. The charity has a special focus on local young people, who often grow up feeling excluded from an urban landscape that isn’t designed with them in mind. By helping to create the garden, they gain new skills and perspectives, including a sharper understanding of the challenges presented by climate change.

‘We call our spaces “gardens of a thousand hands”,’ explains Nicole Van den Eijnde, one of the two directors of Global Generation. ‘The local community creates them together.’ 

In 2024 volunteers from Somers Town harvested 300 kg of fresh produce from the Story Garden, to be donated to food banks in the area. 

‘It’s called the Story Garden because the Library is the home of the nation’s stories,’ says Community Engagement Coordinator Lilan Lemouchi. ‘It truly has transformed local people's experience of the area. They have an intense sense of ownership of the garden.’

Change is coming to the garden in the autumn. In September, the Global Generation project will move to a permanent location at the Triangle Site on York Way. Work on our new development will begin in 2026 and we hope to open our new spaces in 2032. 

We’ll continue to collaborate with the charity to create green community spaces here at the Library. Recently Global Generation created planters for the Piazza inspired by our Reading Rooms, and showed staff how to care for the plants. Since spring Somers Town residents have also been growing a meadow garden onsite to celebrate our latest exhibition, Unearthed: The Power of Gardening. Some of the items on display in Unearthed were created by local people at workshops hosted by Global Generation.

In fact the plans for our new development were heavily influenced by the Story Garden project. When the architects heard how much local people loved the space, they made sure to include a new community garden in the scheme, which will be co-designed and co-managed with local residents. The garden will be shaped by the needs of local residents, with lots of opportunities to gain new skills. It will open when the extension is complete. 

‘We’re drawing inspiration from Global Generation’s work to understand how we can be a better neighbour,’ says Lilan. ‘It's been an incredible learning experience to see the community spirit grown from their soil.’

by Lucy Peters

 

We’ve now published our 2024–25 Annual Report and Accounts, outlining the key accomplishments and challenges for the year, and how we’ve been performing as an organisation.

It details what has been a year of transition for the Library as we have welcomed our new Chief Executive, Rebecca Lawrence, continued to recover from the cyber-attack in 2023 and made strong progress with some of our key Knowledge Matters priorities.

The scale of the technology rebuild following the cyber-attack means that our recovery has taken longer than initially anticipated and continues to be gradual. We understand the frustration this has caused many of our users and we’re determined to complete the recovery of the services on which they depend.

Despite these ongoing challenges we have made important progress: restoring full access to the physical collection, enabling more remote ordering of collection items to the Reading Rooms, providing access to some of our most-used digital learning resources and most unique digitised manuscripts, and restoring access to electronic Legal Deposit books and journal articles received up to the date of the cyber-attack at our legal deposit library partners’ sites.

Over the past year we have reached important milestones in major capital projects that will secure our future. We were delighted to have confirmation from Mitsui Fudosan of their £1.1 billion landmark investment into the major expansion of our St Pancras site; construction has reached an advanced stage for our world-class collection management building at Boston Spa, which will provide the next generation of storage for our collections; and the Government confirmed its intention to invest £10 million to bring the Temple Works building in Leeds into public ownership and to further explore its viability as a future home for the Library.

The BookBinder © Lizzie Coombes

Alongside this there have been other significant achievements:

• our exhibition Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music reached nearly 800,000 people across the UK through our Living Knowledge Network partnership of public libraries
• we gave 18–24-year-olds a platform to create meaningful stories for social media with the creation of our Young Creators Lab youth programme
• Library items digitised with partners were used almost 90 million times
• our Business & IP Centre National Network supported over 40,000 people to create and develop small businesses
• our Endangered Archives Programme celebrated its 20th anniversary.

These are just a few examples of the extraordinarily diverse and dynamic programme delivered over the year.

As ever, our collections have continued to grow, with over 195,000 physical items received this year under legal deposit. However, the cyber-attack continues to limit significant aspects of collection processing for both physical and digital legal deposit, and work to address a backlog and assess potential gaps will be an important task as we look to complete our recovery.

Despite this, our core responsibility of developing and caring for our collections continued. 2,500 items received direct remedial conservation, a further 3,100 were prepared for digitisation, and 7,500 items benefitted from bespoke boxing and storage.

We added many unique heritage items of significance:

• the archive of novelist and playwright John Galsworthy, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932
• a rare illuminated charter issued by Edward III to David de Wollore
• 15 pages of autograph sketches and drafts by Sir Edward Elgar
• the only known surviving copy of a printed broadside mandate issued by Henry VIII’s confessor John Longland
• the archive of science fiction writer Christopher Priest.

Throughout this year our focus has been on becoming a more resilient institution, able to respond to the extraordinary changes and pressures that are reshaping the knowledge sector at speed. We are deeply grateful for our remarkable community of partners, peers, supporters and users who are working with us to achieve this.

Max Benson

Public Policy Officer

An interview with Kim Thompson

Kim Thompson lives in Leeds. She is using the British Library’s online newspaper collection, accessed through FindMyPast.com, to research the history of her family.

I first became interested in researching my family history about 16 years ago. I was curious about my grandparents, who had all died either before I was born or when I was young. I’ve got children of my own, and I wanted to know where I came from, and be able to pass the knowledge on. I signed up with all these genealogy sites and I found some wonderful articles on the British Library website about some of my ancestors. My research now goes back to the early 1600s.

My mother’s paternal grandfather was a big puzzle for a very long time. He’d told a few porkie pies in the 1901 census, so that set me back. I traced every single person with his name, unable to find him. Then I did a DNA test, and learned that he’d changed his identity to that of a dead man: a man he knew, from his hometown. This man used to go drinking in a pub run by my great-grandfather, but he had a gambling problem and committed suicide. Around the same time, my great-grandfather disappeared from his hometown, Norwich. The following year, he turned up in London using this other man’s name and age. I still don’t fully understand all the reasons behind it.

The Library holds the transcript of the trial

After I’d found his identity, I could go back a few more generations, and that’s when I found that his great-grandmother was hanged for murder in 1815. The Library holds the transcript of the trial. Reading it was like being in the courtroom: you could see the whole thing happening and what led up to it.

Her name was Elizabeth Woolterton and she was hanged in 1815, in Ipswich. She was a farmer’s wife. She lost her husband in 1811, and had this farm to run. Her husband had left her a thousand pounds, which was quite a lot of money back then, but by 1814, she’d run out of money. She wasn’t very good at managing things, I think. Her uncle promised her that when he died, he’d leave her his house.

She used to bake him cakes, and a few times, after he ate them, he was unwell. She baked another one and got her son to take it round to his house, but he didn’t want it because he’d been ill the last time he’d eaten one. He gave it to his housekeeper to get rid of, and instead of throwing it away, she gave it to her grandchildren. Her grandson ate too much of the cake, and, unfortunately, he died from it. They did the autopsy and found traces of arsenic. At the trial, they said that she was after her uncle’s money, and she was found guilty of the death.

Each person I’ve found has their own little story

My great-great-grandfather’s sister was a kleptomaniac. She never married. In the 1850s, she was her great-aunt’s companion, and when her great-aunt died, she took a turn for the worse, and got caught stealing a few times. The first time she was given a caution and let off, because her family was quite respectable. The second time, a few years later, she was staying at a rectory, and they went out one day and she helped herself to the entire kitchen. But the vicar’s son became suspicious and followed her. She’d stashed it all in a cabbage patch. He confronted her, and she lay down in the cabbage patch, saying, ‘Oh, I don’t feel too well.’ She got six months for that. I haven’t found anything more about her; I think she might have reformed.

It did get to a point where every ancestor was worse than the one before. I’d like to find some nice pipe-and-slippers, in-bed-by-nine-o’clock-type ancestors. I was saying to someone recently, it’s a surprise that I’ve turned out half as normal as I have. Each person I’ve found has their own little story. My great-grandfather, the one who left his wife behind, had two girlfriends in the early 1900s, and one of them became my great-grandmother. She worked at Bryant and May at the time of the matchgirls’ strike. While she was struggling in the East End of London, making match boxes, her father’s second cousin was having tea with Queen Victoria, because he became the Mayor of London.

History was my favourite lesson as a child

It’s about finding out who you are, the people you’ve come from. My children think I've got an ancestor for every occasion. I’ve discovered that on my dad’s side, there was an astronomer involved in the moon landing in 1969. He was the first director of the Parkes Observatory in Australia. So – moon landing: I’ve got an ancestor for that. The Great Fire of London – I tell them, your eighth great-grandfather’s cousin was Dean of St Paul’s. He became archbishop and crowned James II. Sometimes I think they just shake their heads.

History was my favourite lesson as a child. I was probably quite inquisitive when I was younger. Going back to the age of seven or eight, when we got a newspaper, I’d turn to the middle and look at the births, marriages and deaths, to see if I knew anyone that had been born or got married or anyone on the street that might have died.

I always recommend the Library to new researchers

I wouldn’t have found out half as much if I hadn’t come across the British Library website. Sometimes making a discovery is as simple as just typing in a name. I always recommend the Library to new researchers and anyone who’s interested in the past.

As told to Lucy Peters