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Islington Museum

The borough's history in a gallery under Finsbury Library, free, from Lenin's bust to the library books Joe Orton went to prison for.

Free

Photo by Stephen McKay, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Islington's museum opened in 2008 in the basement of Finsbury Library on St John Street, and its one gallery takes the borough by theme rather than by date: childhood, food, fashion, leisure, healthcare, home, wartime, caring and the radicals. The radicals are the point. A bust of Lenin, who edited Iskra a few streets away on Clerkenwell Green, stands here, and so do the library book covers that Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell doctored with cut-out collages in the early 1960s, for which Islington prosecuted them and a court sent them to prison for six months. Entry is free, and the local history centre in the same building holds the borough's archives.

Where
245 St. John Street, Clerkenwell, EC1V 4PB
Nearest station
Angel · 8 min walk

Step-free access

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