How The London Library Was Saved During the Second World War

Queen Camilla celebrated the library’s unrivaled collection that was nearly destroyed by German bombs in February 1944

Queen Camilla at a celebratory dinner with prominent members of The London Library including actress Helena Bonham Carter, the library’s first female president, and comedian Stephen Fry, February 4, 2025

“We have seventeen miles of books here”

Queen Camilla was all smiles at a dinner on February 4^th honoring The London Library, a venerable collection of a million volumes in the heart of London at 14 St. James’s Square. She has been its patron since June 2024— yet another expression of her love of reading and support for books and literacy. She was joined in the handsome main Reading Room by actress Helena Bonham Carter, the library’s first female president, comedian Stephen Fry, and a group of literary luminaries. “It is very easy to be astonished by the atmosphere of this place,” said Bonham Carter. “We have seventeen miles of books here, which is the equivalent of the Underground Circle line.”

The main Reading Room at The London Library

The London Library, largely supported by annual membership dues of £615 a year, has been an invaluable resource for writers since its founding 184 years ago. Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens, and Ian Fleming were among its notable members. Sir Tim Rice and Sir Tom Stoppard served as president before Helena Bonham Carter, and other contemporary writers among its 7,500 members include Margaret MacMillan, Lady Antonia Fraser, Simon Schama, and Sir Kazuo Ishiguro. Nearly everything in the collection is on open shelves and available for loan, often for months at a time.

The rolling periodical stacks in the basement of The London Library

I’ve spent hours prowling the stacks while researching my books about members of the royal family. For my latest biography, George VI and Elizabeth: The Marriage That Saved the Monarchy, I sat in the basement for two weeks immersed in bound copies of The Illustrated London News starting in the 1920s. I lugged out the heavy volumes from the rolling shelves and took hundreds of pictures on my phone. It was a revelatory trove of photographs and first-hand accounts of the royal family’s activities, many of which had been long forgotten.

Two pages from a 1923 volume of The Illustrated London News displaying wedding gifts for the future King George VI and Queen Elizabeth

All that could have disappeared on the night of February 23, 1944, when an intense bombing attack by the German Luftwaffe targeted London and directly hit The London Library. Reading the diaries of writers who frequented the library, I discovered the dramatic story of how they saved the collection from destruction.