Last week I spent a day “working” in the British Library. And I use inverted commas because no work, in the conventional sense, got done. Couldn’t concentrate at all, to be honest. Why? Well, it certainly had nothing to do with the library’s policy of admitting undergraduates, which has upset the likes of the biographer Claire Tomalin and the historian Antonia Fraser so much.

In fact, I’ve just looked up the vociferous complaints that the historian, professor and TV personality Tristram Hunt has made in relation to the issue, which, like international football tournaments, seems to flare up biennially, and I have no idea what he’s on about. In May 2006, for instance, he complained in a newspaper article that the admission of undergraduates means “it is proving ever more difficult even to get a seat”.

But the longest I’ve waited for a desk in the 12 months I’ve spent, on and off, working in the place is five minutes.

Last year he was quoted in The Times complaining that the library has for undergraduates become “a groovy place to get a frappuccino” rather than a place to study books. All very well, but the BL café doesn’t sell frappucinos and you can’t take beverages into the reading rooms anyway.

Then, around the same time, he was quoted in an American paper, saying about undergraduates: “They’re sitting next to me with their Walkmen on and I tell them to turn it off. I’ve become like a granddad and I’m only 33.”

Tristram: no British youth has used a Walkman since 1999. They’re called iPods and MP3 players now. You may be 33 but you sound 73.

Indeed, it strikes me that there are many more serious problems with the BL as a working environment besides the undergraduates, not least people such as Tristram, the biographer Claire Tomalin, and the historian Antonia Fraser. Basically there are way too many successful writers working there, and while I know this has always been an issue at an institution where the buttocks of Marx, Woolf and Dickens have at various times warmed seats, it’s demotivating for the rest of us — an adult version of sitting next to the class nerd. You can’t help but think: “I’ve got no chance competing against that — may as well give up and make paper aeroplanes.” Or the adult equivalent: browsing eBay on your iPhone.

The second problem is that the British Library reading rooms are too quiet to concentrate. I’m referring to a paradox that researchers who study sound and concentration have discovered: that workspaces designed to be quiet actually increase the likelihood of distraction because in silence even someone’s breathing can seem loud.

In other words, you need some background noise to focus and in the BL there is very little, which is perhaps why people such as Tristram Hunt huff around in a state of perpetual annoyance.

But even this, combined with all the factors cited above, is not as distracting as . . . the sexual tension. All libraries are, of course, petri dishes of simmering lust, but the BL is extreme: its walls contain more erotic pressure than an oil rig, a North Sea fishing trawler and several series of Mad Men combined. And it turns out that I’m not alone in thinking so. In 2005, Olivia Stewart-Liberty reported in The Spectator that “the whole building sighs with hothouse groans, which swell and fade to muffle other sounds”; in 2006 a gay website exposed the British Library as a cottaging ground and the regular BL readers who I’ve discussed it with concur.

Not that we can agree as to why. Explanations put forward include: the intrinsic erotic appeal of women in pencil skirts, stockings and Sarah Palin spectacles telling you off; the intrinsic filthiness of all librarians (after all, Casanova was one); the enforced silence and bookish atmosphere, which conspire to make you want to do something loud and physical in response; the safety (the theory goes that people feel free to flirt without feeling obliged to take things farther); the presence of books, which after all, are intrinsically sexy and have been connected to seduction for hundreds of years; the unexpected corners.

Though, personally, my preferred explanation is the silence. Let’s face it, human beings are animals, there is potential for sexual tension everywhere, even in parts of West Bromwich, but normally people’s attractiveness is counteracted by the noises that they make — the grunts, groans and conversation that might reveal they are married, stupid, have an unattractive accent, an obnoxious personality or, very simply, do not fancy you in return. But when everyone is sitting around in silence, you can project what you like on to them and everyone remains a sexual possibility. And the thing that convinced me of this theory is an anecdote a regular reader recently told me about the time she spent working in the Humanities 2 reading room.

A couple of weeks into it she noticed that the same man was sitting near her. It’s not something that would normally have registered, she says, but (a) this man bore a passing resemblance to Daniel Craig, and (b) she had been single for two years and, before she knew it, for the first time in her life, she had become infatuated. An infatuation she assumed was reciprocated because whenever she sat somewhere other than her normal seat, this bloke would seem to move and sit near her.

This went on for months and eventually, one Wednesday morning, when he was sitting right next to her, the inevitable happened: he passed her a folded note. And, for a moment, time seemed to come to a standstill. As she opened it, her heart was beating so loudly she thought that Tristram Hunt himself would storm over and tell her to be quiet. Blushing, feeling that her life would never be the same again, she read the words that had been scrawled in pencil.

They said: “Excuse me, but could you stop sniffing so loudly, please?” She’s been working in another part of the library since, facing a blank wall. And if I go back to “work” in the British Library, I’ll probably do the same.

sathnam@thetimes.co.uk

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