Life in the present-day Lake District is dominated by tourism and outdoor activities. This pattern of life became established around 100 years ago. The preceding century saw the discovery of the Lake District by a small band of writers and artists.

The Armitt Library was founded in accordance with the will of Mary Louise Armitt (historian and naturalist) and the wishes of her two sisters, ‘to create a collection of books of scientific, literary and antiquarian value’ for the ‘student and book-lover’, and eventually a small museum. It was opened in 1912, and embodied the old 1828 Ambleside Book Society, of which William Wordworth had been a member, and the Ambleside Ruskin Library, founded by Hardwicke Rawnsley  in 1882 with the active support of John Ruskin.

There was no public library in Ambleside and, apart from a few motor cars and a handful of telephones, communication had hardly changed since Wordsworth’s day. The new library was meeting a need. About 10 years after it opened, a significant collection of early works about the Lake District was bequeathed to the Armitt.

There is an exhibition space containing a variety of interactive experiences, and a reference library containing the collection of rare books. An area is devoted to Beatrix Potter, with her desk just as she would have used it to paint her water-colour pictures, and the surrounding walls displaying for the first time some of her natural history water-colours.

The landscape photographs of Herbert Bell are superimposed on a birdseye view of the Lakes, and when you touch the picture you are interested in you are transported over the Lake District to the place where it was taken.

In recent years, a major collection has been built up of the works of Kurt Schwitters, the avant-garde émigré artist who spent the last four years of his life living in Ambleside. In a significant addition to the collection, the Fell and Rock Climbing Club of the English Lake District (FRCC) has placed its library of mountaineering literature in the Armitt and is available for public reference. They have also added to the Armitt’s very large photographic collection.