This refurbishment can best be described as a fusion of conservation and innovation, merging old with new, to finally open up the museum to a new and admiring public.

In 1823, architect Robert Smirke was commissioned to design a building in London to house the King's Library and to provide a proper home for the museum's collections. It took some 24 years to build.

The original museum had four principal wings arranged around an open, two-acre (0.8-hectare), quadrangle-shaped courtyard. No sooner had the British Museum been completed in 1857 than a growing demand for storage space dictated that a new copper-domed reading room be built in the middle of the courtyard.

The great Round Reading Room became a popular haven, used by such luminaries as Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Oscar Wilde, Leon Trotsky, Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, and Virginia Woolf.

In Woolf's, A Room of One's Own, she wrote, "If the truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British Museum, where, I asked myself, ...is truth?" Despite its popularity, the dome-shaped room became overrun with books and museum artifacts, and, over the years, the courtyard was lost to the public eye.