The Forum is a public building in Norwich, United Kingdom. Opened in 2001, the building was designed by the British architectural firm Sir Michael Hopkins and Partners and exists on the site of and replaces the Norwich Central Library, which burnt down in 1994. Following a design which was initially rejected, the final version of the building contains the Norfolk and Norwich Millennium Library to the west end of the building, as well as office and commercial spaces and studios for the BBC around a main atrium. The building is fronted by a glass façade with a surrounding brick wall and inner steel frame supporting a glass and zinc panel roof. The project cost £66 million, of which £31 million was from the Millennium Commission. The library has been named one of the most popular in the country, while The Forum is a venue for public events and festivals and the outside plain hosts live performances. Despite winning several awards, the building has been criticised for its use of materials and has been likened to a shopping mall and airport terminal.
Background
Prior to The Forum, the Norwich Central Library sat on the same site from January 1963 until its destruction by fire in August 1994. Built in the Brutalist style, the library was the first major central library to open in the country after World War II, and was opened by the Queen Mother. It cost £350,000, with £30,000 donated by the United States Air Force 2nd Air Division going towards a room for an American library and to act as a memorial for the lives lost during World War II. Norwich had been the first city to adopt the Public Libraries Act 1850, establishing a free public library at Charing Cross in 1857. In 1937, it was suggested that "more suitable accommodation" was required to meet "immediate requirements" and so the central library was built.
On 1 August 1994, at 7:20 a.m. British Summer Time (BST), an electrical fault in the American library set fire to a bookshelf. The fire quickly spread; within two minutes, flames were already escaping through the roof and about ten minutes later, the fire had "swept through the first floor". The first fire crews arrived at 7:33 a.m. and 150 firefighters tackled the blaze with Anglian Water increasing the water pressure to assist the firefighters. Jean Kennedy, who had been the City and County Archivist since 1963 and headed the Norfolk Record Office which was based in the basement of the library, reported that firefighters entered the building shortly after 11:30 a.m. with other staff entering later to begin removing surviving records. The record office, which contained between two and three million documents, had withstood the fire, exceeding its expected two hours of fire resistance. Firefighters fought the fire for three days. An initial report claimed that the fire had been caused by a gas explosion and that more than 350,000 books had been lost, but the figure was later reported to be up to 155,000, with 125,000 books lost from the lending and reference department. A figure from the BBC years later put the loss at 170,000 books. Also lost were the American library and its 3,500 books, two-thirds of the Colman collection, which contained 10,000 documents, letters and pamphlets on Norfolk, the 18th-century Rye collection, original collections of cartes de visite, a bank of 35mm negative film, a large part of the local studies photographic archive, early newspapers, orchestral scores and documents relating to Norwich School. About 15,000 Norwich prints were lost in total. The library had to be subsequently demolished due to the damage.