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Children losing out
• YOU reported on the continued use of the British Museum Reading Room as exhibition space until 2012 (Hidden: historic Reading Room buried under blockbuster shows, July 24).
Your report focused on the views of architects about the loss.
However, there is another group who lose out: the children who used to visit the excellent children’s area and library which was situated inside the Reading Room.
This provided a comfortable environment where children (and their parents) could read books on history and do craft and drawings.
I took my daughter (then three years old) on many occasions and she greatly enjoyed it.
She will be nine before she can do it again.
No attempt has been made to recreate this excellent facility in another part of the building, as the temporary reading room facility is small and crowded. This is a loss, especially to Londoners, which no number of (expensive) special exhibitions will be able to replace.
DAVID KANER
Mercer Street, WC2
Dreary
• IT is entirely right that the former Reading Room at the British Museum should now be a venue for a major exhibition on the life and work of Hadrian (New Journal, July 24).
The room itself is modelled on the Pantheon in Rome, Hadrian’s magnificent exercise in expressing cosmology in architecture.
The great temple still stands almost intact because it has long since been a Christian church.
With its active life over, the Reading Room has now become rather a sad and dreary expanse, and needs new purpose.
Despite what Dan Cruikshank and Brian Sewell may think, perhaps it has already found it.
JAMES COLLINS
Belsize Grove, NW3
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