Central Library

A few weeks ago me & a few flickr friends spent some time at Manchester's Central Library, photographing the building before it closes for major renovations. Due to obvious changes that will occur, the library have decided to relax the rules on photography, so as long as we didn't photography people's faces etc (well unless we asked first) we could go mad and also post them to the Get Wisdom flickr group.
I will confess, it was my first time back in the building since I was at university and it was actually a lot more impressive than I recall. Designed by architect E. Vincent Harris and built in 1934 the 'heart of the library' The Great Hall (previously known as a the Reading Room) is probably the most recognized architecturally for it's large glass dome in the roof.
Outside this room is an outer corridor of beautiful arches
and more stacks of books,along with seemingly endless rows of tiny drawers containing microfilm cards etc.. which seemed to hold the group attention for a quite while, yielding some varied results.

Most of the library is now closed, with the ground floor general readers library closing 18th June and the Theatre & Box office closing 4th July with the newly renovated library planned to reopen in 2013 for more info check the Manchester Libraries website