Queen Elizabeth II Great Court

Space in the British Museum, London

The Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, commonly referred to simply as the Great Court, is the covered central quadrangle of the British Museum in London. It was redeveloped during the late 1990s to a design by Foster and Partners, from a 1970s design by Colin St John Wilson. The court was opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 2000.

The court has a tessellated glass roof, engineered by Buro Happold and built by Waagner Biro, covering the entire court, and surrounds the original circular British Museum Reading Room in the centre, now a museum. It is the largest covered square in Europe. The glass and steel roof is made up of 4,878 unique steel members connected at 1,566 unique nodes and 1,656 pairs of glass windowpanes making up 6,100 m2 of glazing; each of a unique shape because of the undulating nature of the roof. Controversially, some of the stone in the court is from France, rather than being Portland Stone from southern England as agreed in the original contract with the masons. Within the Great Court, there are shops and a café. The court acts as a central linking point for the museum, somewhat like I. M. Pei's Louvre Pyramid in Paris.

The central courtyard of the British Museum was occupied by the British Library until 1997, when it moved to St Pancras. At that time the entire courtyard was filled with bookshelves, three storeys high (the "book stacks"). To get from one side of the museum to the other, visitors had to go around. Once the Library had moved out, the book stacks were cleared and the Great Court constructed in this central courtyard. A new 'ground' level was created, a story higher than the original courtyard, with the space below used to accommodate the Clore Education Centre and the African galleries (which had been housed at the Museum of Mankind since 1970). The South Portico was largely rebuilt, with two new lifts incorporated for disabled access to the upper levels of the museum. A new gridshell glass roof, designed and built by Austrian specialists Waagner Biro, was provided over the entire courtyard to create a covered space at the centre of the museum. The British Library Reading Room at the centre of the courtyard was retained and refurbished for use as the Museum library and information centre. The Reading Room had no outer wall; the book stacks came right up to the back of the Reading Room shelves. So a new outer wall was created to protect the Reading Room, to support the new roof and to conceal the ventilation ducts serving the spaces below. North of the Reading Room there is a block with a museum shop at ground level, a gallery for temporary exhibitions above and a restaurant above that, just below the glass roof.