A banner featuring Karl Marx, with the Marx Memorial Library building behind him. Photograph Paul Halas

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An Archive of Ideas to Change the World

by Paul Halas

Housed in an elegant eighteenth century building in Clerkenwell, the Marx Memorial Library & Workers’ School contains a comprehensive collection of books, pamphlets, artworks, newspapers and magazines, and is a centre for both historical and current Marxist study. Although the Memorial Library itself is not affiliated with any political party, it is an essential and invaluable resource for anyone who has an interest in left wing politics and its history. Its unique archive and artefacts trace over a century of Marxist and working-class activity, which draws visitors and students of Marxism from Britain and all over the world. Earliest material dates back to the 1640s.

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Director Meirian Jump explains, “We were founded in 1933, 50 years after Marx’s death, by the Marx Commemoration Committee, formed of socialists, communists, and trade unionists. We have the invitations and archives from when the Committee met, along with records of what they discussed regarding marking the occasion of Marx’s half-century anniversary. In part, the Marx Memorial Library was established to highlight Marx’s ties to the British working class. In 1933, news was coming through about book burnings in Germany. After discussing these events, it was decided that a library would be a sensible initiative, alongside an organisation dedicated to working-class education. We’ve been in this building at 37 Clerkenwell Green ever since.

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“We started with about 500 books on Marxism and offered courses, including evening classes, lectures around shift work, and correspondence courses on anti-fascism, imperialism, and political economy. It was a radical programme, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, when our educational work was expanding. This building was chosen as a fitting place for a library because it has a fascinating radical history of its own.”

The building itself, now a grade II listed structure, was designed by one James Steer and built in 1738 as a Welsh Charity School.

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When the school outgrew the premises it was split into several workshops, including a coffee house for the International Working Men’s Association. It is probable that Karl Marx himself spoke on the site when he lived in London, and Lenin certainly used the library for a period during his exile in London, editing and printing the journal Iskra (The Spark) from this address between 1902 and 1903.

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In the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Clerkenwell and the surrounding area was known as a centre for radical thought in London, and the premises was used for meetings by various progressive societies. The Twentieth Century Press, the first socialist printing press in Clerkenwell, was set up here, and went on to produce some of the earliest English editions of Marx’s writings. The Arts and Crafts movement leading light and polymath William Morris, was one of its benefactors.

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Meirian: “Morris was a humane socialist, quite a complex figure in many ways. We often have students visiting us. The Social Democratic Federation was based here from the 1890s to around 1922. When Lenin was expelled from another European capital in 1902, Harry Quelch, editor of the Social Democratic Federation’s 20th Century Press, invited him and his editorial board to print Iskra (The Spark).

“Because of that rich history, our library was established here. The building is 500 years old, and our function has evolved and expanded in many ways. We now occupy three storeys, with 60,000 books, pamphlets, and nationally significant archival collections. As an archivist by training, my passion lies in using our archives on working-class history and social history. We recently submitted an application for major funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund. The project is called People and Ideas to Change the World. We want this building to be a hub, a place where people from the local community, trade unionists, activists, young people and scholars, including those who may have never set foot here before, and say they’re not political, can come in and explore. They can look at the materials and think, ‘What does this mean to you? What has changed? What have people done in the past to improve their conditions? What can we learn, and what can we do now?’ This is a broad vision, but it’s what we strive to achieve with school students, community centres, online audiences, and international visitors. Our collections are a particular strength. We have the archives of the International Brigade Association, collections on campaigns against empire, for peace and on women’s liberation.”

The building contains a great network of catacomb-like rooms. Within the archive is the Spanish section, the most comprehensive records of the Spanish Civil War, the International Brigades, and the aid Spain movement in Britain, that helped pave the way for post war anti-fascist movements. There’s a wealth of material on workers’ struggles from Tolpuddle to Wapping, from the Chartists to the NUM. There is the Morning Star archive dating back to the first issue in 1930.

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The library also possesses a collection of more than 2,000 posters, many of them both stunning and irreplaceable. Prominent displayed in the library is The Worker of the Future Clearing away the Chaos of Capitalism, by Jack Hastings, who was an acolyte of the revolutionary artist Diego Rivera. This imposing fresco adorns the wall of the first floor reading room, and depicts many of the leading lights of the British Labour movement vanquishing class enemies in a variety of (sometimes very humorous) ways. It is both witty and arresting.

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As mentioned, readers, researchers and activists from all over the world visit the library to make use of these resources. The reading room is open to the public three days a week, and the digitisation of the archive is ongoing, so key components can be made available online.

It will come as no surprise that readers, researchers and activists from all over the world make extensive use of the Marx Memorial Library’s resources. Our reading room is open to the public three days a week, and we are currently digitising these unique archives to make them available online. Lottery funding has been applied for, in order to further widen engagement with the collection, create an exhibition space, and improve accessibility.

As an educational charity, the library hosts weekly classes and lectures, which cover a wide range of subjects, such as labour history, socialist art, the housing crisis… It hosts film festivals, exhibitions and book launches, and has begun to expand its education program in new ways and now offers inline education modules, ideal for remote learning, in addition to workshops for school groups, and day classes and courses for trade union activists.

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The library is dedicated to the advancement of education, knowledge and understanding of all aspects of Marxism and the history of socialism, and seeks to inspire future generations to build a better, more fulfilling and egalitarian world. It is a precious resource, not only for the people of Great Britain, but for everyone. Further information is available on the Marx Memorial Library website.

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Paul Halas is a writer whose escape from 1970s hippiedom was the discovery that he could invent stories. He spent forty years contributing to various Disney magazines and books, as well as a variety of non-Disney comics, books, and animated films. His retirement from commercial writing coincided with Jeremy Corbyn becoming the Labour Party leader (he is a self-described Corbynista) and becoming a Labour activist between 2015 and 2020… only to quit the party in despair soon after its recapture by the right wing of the organisation following the 2019 electoral tragedy. He has now rediscovered his first love – writing funny stories – which is just as well, as the real world isn’t very funny at present.