The National Poetry Library is a free public collection housed at Royal Festival Hall in London's Southbank Centre.

Situated on the fifth floor of the Royal Festival Hall, overlooking the river Thames, the library aims to hold all contemporary UK poetry publications since 1912.

It houses the largest collection in Britain, numbering over 200,000 items, including works by small presses.

Membership is free and material is borrowed through the national inter-lending library services or returned by post.

As well as poets laureate, though, we see school students, families with young children, casual readers, critics, academics, teachers and artists 'squeezing every morning into modern poetry.

He wrote "The Poetry Library is one of the occasional pure flowerings of the imagination for which the English are so seldom given credit".

[6] Poet Laureate Andrew Motion echoes Larkin's sentiments: "The most extraordinary thing, is the fact that it exists at all.