HIDDEN gem of London’s working-class history will soon be opening its doors to the public for the first time. 

The Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School will, from April 14, offer guided tours to the public on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 1pm. They are ideal for a lunch-break visit and the Library is one of the capital’s best kept secrets.

It is located on Clerkenwell Green, where London’s annual May Day rally gathers, just a couple of minutes’ walk from Farringdon station.

Nestled in the heart of radical Clerkenwell, the library has a fascinating story to tell.

The 18th century building was originally a charity school for the children of Welsh migrants in London.

Later the property was broken up into a mishmash of artisan workshops, with mattress-makers and cabinet-manufacturers sat alongside watch-making studios and coffee houses.

Our tours will allow people to visit the room and desk where Lenin worked in exile in London in 1902-1903. The Lenin Room — a box-like annex where the six-strong editorial board of Iskra (The Spark) met to discuss the issues of the day — also shows a map depicting the route the clandestine publication took when smuggled across Europe.

See two banners of the British Battalion of volunteers in the Spanish civil war of 1936-39 which list the major battles of the International Brigades including Cordoba, Jarama, Brunete, Belchite and the Ebro.

One was sewn by the women of Barcelona as a gesture of thanks, the other by the Artists International Association. These were recently shown at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester as part of the exhibition Conscience and Conflict: British Artists and the Spanish Civil War.

View artefacts from major industrial disputes, such as the miners’ and Wapping strikes of the 1980s.

Among these is a unique collection of badges and over 100 commemorative ceramic plates created by the National Union of Mineworkers and its branches, originally sold to raise funds for the miners and their families.

Also on display will be a Hammersmith Socialist Society banner embroidered by William Morris’s family, dating from the early 1890s.

A rotating exhibit of posters features anti-fascist Soviet imagery, campaign material against South African apartheid and 19th-century Chartist billboards. 

Panels explain the building’s radical history. It was home to Twentieth Century Press and hosted meetings of the London Patriotic Society and the International Working Men’s Association.

In addition, the Grade II-listed building’s historic vaults — which date back to the 15th century — can be visited. These tunnels house the library’s complete archive of the Daily Worker and Morning Star.

Back copies date from its first issue, which went to press on January 1 1930. Stacked high, the bound papers bring researchers to the library from all over the world.

Book cases and cabinets in warren-like archive store rooms are home to world-class library and archive collections such as the International Brigade Association archive, the Bernal Peace Library and historian James Klugmann’s pamphlet collection.

Highlights also include a relief of Lenin by Laurence Bradshaw — the sculptor behind Marx’s grave at Highgate Cemetery — and a memorial courtyard dedicated to media workers killed in the 20th-century war against fascism, from Spain in 1936 to victory in Europe in 1945.  

Jack Hastings’s floor-to-ceiling fresco entitled The Worker of the Future Clearing Away the Chaos of Capitalism depicts David Owen, Frederick Engels, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and William Morris and can be found in the library’s Reading Room.

Until now visits to the library have been by appointment only, or on special occasions. Now dedicated volunteers will be on site to help visitors to explore this historic building, its collections and displays, and to tell their own tales about work at the library.

The library was founded by a group of socialists in 1933 in response to the burning of the books by the nazis in May of that year and has been at the heart of the British labour movement ever since.

• Booking recommended. For more information email admin@mml.xyz or call (020) 7253-1485. £5/£3 unwaged. The library can be found at 37a Clerkenwell Green, London EC1R 0DU.
• Meirian Jump is the library’s archivist and library development officer.