Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Goulder.

I'm whispering because I'm in a library, except actually you don't need to listen and this is a library like no other.

It is the sparkling, new, spectacular central library in Helsinki, in Finland.

And I'm actually just stepping out onto the third floor terrace.

It's a bit of a grey day.

But even so, you get a lovely panorama looking across to the lakes and the

monuments of this fine city. The structure itself is shaped like a wave or perhaps a wing, and it's

just full of people. This is just the middle of the afternoon and yet there must be a thousand people

in this particular bit. Yes, there are some places and I'm just going out inside now where you can

take books out. There's a good few dozen but actually most people are sitting here, some of them

with their phones, others with their laptops. Over in the corner, there's all children's play

area a little bit earlier. There was some dancing and music and all sorts of other things

that you really do not associate with

library and there's plants in the middle as well the natural light of the far north and bear in mind that we're

pretty much as far north as the northern side of

the northern mainland of Scotland means that well on a summer's day and it's still technically summer

you are going to get an awful lot of light late into the evening, which is good because the place is open, ridiculously long hours for a library, seven days a week, at least 12 hours a day.

And gosh, it's somewhere where you feel as though you stumbled into a kind of wonderland where words are part of the picture.

But actually, it's much more to do with convivial space for whatever you want to do.

I'm not quite sure that I know anywhere really that is like this, certainly not in the UK,

although Birmingham Central Library is spectacular.

The next floor down is just a kind of den.

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