Writing Britain is expansive and immersive, but then what less would you expect from a show that promises to explore a thousand years of English literature, examining the role that “space” and “place” have played in our collective imagination?
Featuring over 150 works – some very famous, some very rare, some dredged from the long forgotten bottom shelves of authors’ offices – it’s an ample offering (though by no means complete: curator Jamie Andrews is keen to stress that this is but a tiny fraction of the 150 million objects in the British Library’s archive) that delights with both its heavy hitters (Tolkein, Dickens, and J.K Rowling all make appearances) and its unexpected treasures (a 10th-century sailor’s poem and a childhood newspaper written by Virginia Wolf, to name but two). Give yourself the time to read and to loiter – to hurry through would be to miss the point entirely.
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