King Street: the Old Library, build 1738-40, was used by Coleridge, Southey and Humphrey Davy. It replaced an older library on the same site which, dating from 1613, was one of the first public libraries in England. Southey joined in 1793 and his first borrowing, William Enfield's History of Philosophy, contained utopian material which gave him ideas for a ‘Southeyopolis’, in advance of his development of Pantisocracy with Coleridge in 1794. In 1795 his borrowings of Classical history books corresponded to topics he was covering in a series of public lectures in Bristol. You can see antique furniture and fittings from the old reading room at the Old Library in The Bristol Room, on the top floor of Bristol Central Library, including an ornate overmantle carved by the famous Grinling Gibbons purchased and donated by a rich Bristolian in 1721.