Seventeen reviews, a 4.4, and a name that promises silence in the city with the most famous libraries in the world
The Library Bar holds a 4.4 from a small sample of seventeen, and carries a name that is one of the most reliable in the entire hospitality industry: the Library Bar.
The library promise
There is a Library Bar in a thousand hotels around the world, and the name always promises the same three things: leather armchairs, dark wood, and quiet. It is shorthand for a certain kind of civilised, hushed, grown-up drinking – the drink you have while pretending to read, in a room designed to make you feel clever and calm.
It is a brilliant name for a bar precisely because a library is the opposite of everything a rowdy bar represents. A library is quiet, orderly, and improving. Attaching the word to a bar promises that you can drink without the noise, the crowds, and the sense that you are wasting your life – that this, somehow, is a respectable place to have a cocktail.
The Prat’s naming desk notes that “the Library Bar” is possibly the most effective single naming formula in the trade, because it sells not a drink but a mood, and the mood it sells is the flattering fiction that you are the kind of person who drinks in libraries.
The Bloomsbury context
And here is what makes this particular Library Bar special: it is in Bloomsbury, the district of the actual great libraries. The British Library is up the road at St Pancras. The British Museum Reading Room, where Marx wrote Das Kapital, is round the corner. The University of London libraries are everywhere. Senate House, the vast art deco library that inspired Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, looms over the whole area.
Bloomsbury is, arguably, the most library-dense square mile on the planet. And in the middle of it sits a bar that has borrowed the word – a tiny, cosy imitation of the enormous institutions that surround it, offering the atmosphere of a library with the one crucial addition that the real ones lack: you are allowed to drink.
The small sample
Seventeen reviews is not enough to trust a score, and we say so plainly, as we have said throughout. A 4.4 from seventeen people is a hint, not a verdict.
But the concept is sound, the district is perfect, and a quiet wine bar dressed as a library, surrounded by the greatest libraries in the world, is exactly the sort of small, unshouty venue this survey has consistently found to be worth the trip.
Verdict
A small, quiet wine bar borrowing the most calming word in the language, in the one district on earth where the real libraries outnumber everything else.
Senate House, and the library that became a nightmare
Worth one detour. The most famous library building in Bloomsbury is Senate House, the University of London’s vast art deco tower – and George Orwell, whose wife worked there during the war, used it as the model for the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
So the district contains both the reading room where Marx wrote the book against capitalism and the library tower that Orwell turned into the headquarters of totalitarian lies. Bloomsbury’s libraries have inspired both the great dream and the great nightmare of twentieth-century politics, and now there is a small bar borrowing their name so you can have a quiet glass of wine among the ghosts of both.
Verdict
A small, quiet wine bar borrowing the most calming word in the language, in the one district on earth where the real libraries outnumber everything else.
Go, order a glass, and enjoy the one thing the British Library up the road will never let you do: drink.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
