The Armitage Room is a space for graduate students to study outside of the Library. It also contains a non-academic, intellectually stimulating leisure reading collection featuring books on academic and professional skills and books that support the MCR's activities.
The study space
The Armitage Room contains 40 study spaces reserved for graduate students only. You can use the kitchen area to make drinks, or bring your own, but please do not eat food.
The spaces operate on a first-come, first-served basis and desks should not be reserved if you are leaving for more than a short break. Belongings left unattended for more than a couple of days will be tidied away to a kitchen cupboard by library staff.
The majority of the room is a quiet study space, but the room beyond the partition on the FF staircase side can be used for social and collaborative work.
Armitage Room reading collection
This collection has been curated in collaboration with the MCR and graduate students, and we hope to continue developing it for the next few years. It consists of popular fiction and non-fiction as well as books by Queens' alumni, on mental health and wellbeing and for academic and professional development. We also buy books by speakers at MCR events such as the Angevin Talks.
You can browse a list of the collection here (last updated January 2024).
The books should be borrowed as normal library books, using our self check PC (there is also a manual borrowing sheet in case this is not working). They are subject to usual Library rules so you can have up to 15 books out at a time across our Library collections, which can be kept for 14 days before needing to be returned or renewed. Please renew books using your Library Account on iDiscover. Armitage Room books cannot be returned via our machine or the self-check PC, so please place your books on the returns shelf where Library staff will take care of them for you. If you are an undergraduate student and wish to borrow a book from this collection, please let us know and we can fetch it for you.
If there's anything you'd like to see in the collection, please let us know! We're eager to work with students on the development of the collection. You can either fill in our book request form, speak to use in the War Memorial Library, or contact us via email.