Newcastle's arching Tyne Bridge, Liverpool's modernist Philharmonic Hall and the classical rotunda of Manchester's central library, which held 300 readers in what was then the country's biggest reading room outside the British Library in London, were all products of the civic and, in some cases, philanthropic determination of local leaders.

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Voices travel up from the ground floor in a smokestack effect and ricochet around the preserved glazed-white brick walls. (The "new" library prefers buzz over the code of silence of the old library.) How different from the older sections of the library where, for instance, one reading room has restored its carved plaster ceiling reproducing Michelangelo's Laurentian Library in Florence.

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The British Library has since improved its security as a result of this case, with a "massive" increase in its CCTV cameras, and in the number of staff who walk around the library's reading room floor.

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The reading room concept originally came from the New York Public Library, during the Depression.

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She described Italian prisons as "pretty swell", with a library, a television in her room, a bathroom and a reading lamp.

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Today, it offers nearly 10, 000 books and other media in a completely renovated, colourful and attractive library room to a target group many members of which are not used to reading regularly.

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