The British Museum is using its iconic reading room for other purposes these days. “Conversions to art galleries are all well and good: Tate Modern and London’s Wapping Project have made virtues of redundant industrial buildings. In Paris, the Musée d’Orsay transformed a railway station into a palace of impressionist art. But it seems to me that the fate of the Reading Room shouldn’t be sealed like this just yet. Can’t the British Museum devise a scenario based on what this iconic space symbolises?”