"The swing doors swung open, and there one stood under the vast dome, as if one were a thought in the huge bald forehead which is so splendidly encircled by a band of famous names." 

-Virginia Woolf, "A Room of One's Own (1929)

The Reading Room was used by a large number of famous figures, including notably Sun Yat-sen, Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, Friedrich Hayek, Bram Stoker, Mahatma Gandhi, Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, George Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, Vladimir Lenin (using the name Jacob Richter[1]), Virginia Woolf, Arthur Rimbaud, Mohammad Ali Jinnah,[3] H. G. Wells[4] and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Museum_Reading_Room

"...[T]he round Reading Room was a marvelous place...I regret its passing almost every day of my life."
-Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, Preface to the 2012 Edition, xxvii.

So unlike the Brits to change anything. As someone said of Churchill so it may be said of the British generally: "He wasn't wrong often but when he was, well, my God." What were they thinking.