It is a truism that the destruction of London wrought by the Luftwaffe has been exceeded in the decades since World War II by the destruction wrought by developers and planning authorities. Among other things, London has been consecrated to the automobile. I remember a few years ago traveling from the blessedly car-free Venice to London. That first day in the English capital, I thought I would have a nervous breakdown. I momentarily despised the place, until I was reacclimated and felt, as I always do in the glow of London’s peculiarities, that I was, spiritually, at home. Recent decades have seen London doubly ravaged, by the new architecture, often of the most hostilely Corbusian variety, and by the automobile.

Nowhere is London more ravaged than in the Euston Road stretching from the patrician quarter of St. Marylebone, along the northern boundary of Fitzrovia, toward Islington and Clerkenwell. Into the north side of the Euston Road, and, what’s more, right next to the St. Pancras Station and Hotel, the distinguished modernist architect Colin St. John Wilson has obtruded his new, monumentally scaled British Library, easily the most discussed new building in London since World War II. The new library cost some half a billion pounds, making it the most expensive building ever erected in the British Isles. At 1.2 million square feet of floor area spread over an eight-acre site, it is “the largest civic building to be constructed in Europe this century,” according to the library’s