When I was in Aberystwyth, I had a decent sized room in the Hugh Owen Building which is halfway up Penglais, with panoramic views over Cardigan Bay. In Sheffield, I had a huge room on the 12th floor of the Arts Tower — and while the daytime urban view wasn’t exactly a delight, on winter evenings the transformation into a glittering landscape of lights was magical. These days I have a very small room in the Faculty, with a window into the grad. centre and otherwise tiny windows too high to look out of, which isn’t as bad as it sounds, but equally isn’t very enticing.
So I work a lot in the Moore Library. It took me a while to really “get it”, but now it strikes me as in many ways a quite splendid building, and I love being there. The reading tables run around the perimeter, so you are looking out to trees and to the modern buildings of the rest of CMS; even when the library is busy, you can only really see a few people either side of you because of the curve of the building and the book shelves which are arranged as along the spokes of a wheel. And while the bookstacks in the UL seemingly run off to infinity (so you can feel lost in a Borgesian nightmare), there is a sense that here the readers are surrounding the mathematical knowledge shelved behind them. There is a rather calming feel to the place, which draws me back especially when things aren’t going well with my book. So I should get down there now …