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A political history of Britain in the places where it happened: parliament and palace, courts and counting houses, and the streets where people pushed back.
The Clerkenwell building where Lenin edited a newspaper, kept as a working library of the left.
Ideas & memory
Also in Literary London and The World in London.
London's value to nineteenth-century revolutionaries was practical: no censorship worth the name, cheap rooms, printers who would take the work, and networks of exiles already in place. Clerkenwell had all of it, which is why Vladimir Lenin produced the Russian revolutionary paper Iskra from a small room in this building in 1902-03. The library itself was founded in 1933, on the fiftieth anniversary of Marx's death and in the year Hitler took power, and it holds collections on socialism, trade unionism, anti-fascism and the Spanish Civil War that few museums bother with. It presents political history as paperwork, printing and organisation rather than speeches, which is what most of it actually was.
Tuesday to Thursday 11:00–16:00 by appointment; tours Mondays at 12:00 and Thursdays at 16:00
Tours £10, £5 concessions, not during the summer closure. Email a week ahead to use the reading room.
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.