AN unassuming building on Clerkenwell Green that houses a vast archive of socialist history will open to the public next week for a new exhibition that brings to life the neighbourhood’s radical past.

The exhibition, called People & Protest: Radical Clerkenwell Reinterpreted, has been co-created by historians and local residents and will open at the Marx Memorial Library on September 25.

MML director Meirian Jump explained: “This is an area where people have tried to change the world in all sorts of different ways.

“We wanted to look at opportunities to get people engaged with those stories.”

Residents on the Finsbury Estate and connected to local community centre The Peel Institute worked with library staff over three sessions to learn about the history of Clerkenwell and eventually choose one artefact that meant something to them personally.

Each artefact in the exhibition – covering themes like protest, colonial-liberation, peace campaigns and radical printing presses – will be displayed together with a photo and story of the participant who selected it.

[Karl Weiss]

For example, one participant chose a document about the introduction of the poll tax, which she connected with by virtue of having met her own husband on anti-poll tax riots thirty years ago.

[Karl Weiss]

Ms Jump said she was struck by how many of the themes that predominate in the library’s archive – housing, squatting, workers’ rights – remain pertinent to people in Clerkenwell today.

“[Clerkenwell] has changed, but it is still a very divided borough,” she said, on whether the neighbourhood still maintained its radical legacy today.

Eventually, Ms Jump hopes that the Library building and its contents can be more available to the local community – with accessible facilities and a walk-in public exhibition space – so that more people can learn about and engage with the radical history of the area.