Every city has their hidden gems, for those who are curious enough to seek them out. Just off the Market Square, Nottingham boasts its very own secret library in a preserved Georgian townhouse. A cornucopia of local history, volumes of fiction and non-fiction, and one of the only walled gardens left in the city, Bromley House Library is a bibliophile’s dream waiting to be explored…
A voice crackles through the intercom, and invites me inside a set of double doors, located in an entranceway on Angel Row. The doors click open, and I walk through them to an echoey white corridor, where a stone staircase winds upwards. Feeling a bit like Lucy discovering Narnia, I climb the stairs and find, not Jack Woltz’s office from The Godfather, but a warmly lit room, with bookshelves reaching the ceiling and a spiral staircase extending to an overhanging balcony. I’m here for a tour of Bromley House Library: one of Nottingham’s best kept secrets.
Once my other fellow visitors have arrived, we’re taken to a room where our friendly tour guide tells us about the building’s history. It was first built in 1752, as a townhouse for banker George Smith, we learn, before a revamp in 1821 as a subscription library.
Next he takes us through the many other rooms, which often feel like microcosms of Nottingham history. One shares its name with the George Green Library at the Uni of Notts; we’re told that the man himself, a mathematics pioneer and namesake of Green’s Windmill in Sneinton, was a member of Bromley House in its early days. Another is named after Ellen Harrington: a librarian here in the 1960s and by legend the first woman in Notts to hold a driving license. Each space is clean, colourful, cosy and packed with tomes of all kinds, from fiction to philosophy; nothing less than paradise for bibliophiles like myself.
I later speak to library director Clare Brown. “We sometimes get some elderly people who’ve lived in Nottingham all their lives and never visited here, saying ‘I thought it wasn’t for the likes of me’,” she explains. “Then they come in, and see that the books are the same as those at a public library. It’s not somewhere outside of normal life. It’s just a rather beautiful bit of the world, here in Nottingham, where lots of normal people do normal things.”
Most of the library members are people over the age 55, Clare says, but anyone can buy a membership, which are sold at discounted prices for 18-25 year olds and people on means tested benefits. For anyone who can't, however, the tours, which the team have held since 2023, provide an alternative way of seeing the library. “We’re keen to make sure that, however people want to access and enjoy the building, we’ll offer them different ways of doing it,” says Clare.
Later in the tour our guide ushers into an attic, and shows us what was the first photographic studio in the Midlands. It was set up around 1840 to demonstrate the potential of daguerreotype: a type of copper plate that was central to the earliest forms of photography. A few rooms later, he points out a brass Meridian line, made in 1827. By absorbing the midday sun through a precisely set hole, it told people the local time before standard time existed. I wait for him to say, “and this is the time machine, first of its kind.”
Soon after, the tour finishes in a wide room near the entrance where we’re told about some of the most notable books kept at the library. They have special collections linked to an array of quirky and unexpected folks, including the former personal library of the late Notts writer Alan Sillitoe, and works belonging to the interestingly named British Sundial Society. The staff tell us that they don’t know what this society does (other than look at sundials) but they’re happy to keep its books safe all the same.
It’s hard to think of another place with as many well-kept fragments of history as Bromley House; throughout the tour I’ve had that enduring feeling of privilege, like I’ve been let in on secrets revealed to only a chosen few.
“Of course some people aren’t here for the books,” Clare tells me later. “They just like the fact that it’s a Georgian building, that was built for a very wealthy family, and now is a working library for a couple thousand members. The fact we’ve got a garden is important too: we’ve got one of only two walled gardens left in the city centre. That’s a precious resource in the city. It’s another strand of our appeal to some people, and we do have a very keen band of gardening volunteers who come in with our regular gardener a few hours a week. They’ll do everything, sweeping up leaves, planting, cleaning, really hard work.”
After the tour, I head downstairs to take a look around that garden, walking past a marble bust of an anonymous man, and into the open air. I’m struck by the tall garden walls which provide this wonderful sense of secrecy and, feeling like I’m in a fantasy novel, I admire the well-kept greenery and tall trees. Back in 2021, the Bromley House team said on their website that this could well be one of the best maintained 18th century gardens in the country; you can certainly believe it when you take a look for yourself.
It’s hard to think of another place with as many well-kept fragments of history as Bromley House; throughout the tour I’ve had that enduring feeling of privilege, like I’ve been let in on secrets revealed to only a chosen few. It’s a rare location: both in its status as a financially stable library that’s avoided the widely publicised ‘death’ of such places, and vault of historical treasures: highly specific tidbits and artefacts that you’d struggle to find elsewhere.
Nevertheless, if you want to ensure that Bromley House continues to be as available to visitors as it is now, and fancy yourself part of that chosen few, go discover its secrets for yourself….
Head to the Bromley House Library to check out their range of literary events and talks, or to book onto one of their regular ninety minute tours.
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