In a bid to visit all of London's local history hubs, we pop into the bountiful basement of Islington Museum.
Islington Museum on St John Street will stop you in your tacks precisely twice. The first 'Oh' moment is a confrontation with the likeness of Vladimir Lenin (above). Municipal buildings usually contain a bust or twelve, but rarely one of the founder of the Soviet Union.
The second WTF comes from a book called Yoga and Health, fronted by a Victorian gent and an Hawaiian goose. It sits beside an Agatha Christie novel centred on a pair of matrimonial cats:
This is why I love local museums.
Lenin's here because he spent much of the 1900s living and working in Islington. He met Stalin and Trotsky in the borough, published a revolutionary newspaper from Clerkenwell Green, and lived in a flat near King's Cross. The bust was unveiled close to Lenin's former home in 1942. But it quickly drew the ire of anti-communists and was repeatedly vandalised and then withdrawn. It's now a museum piece.
The library books are the mischievous handiwork of playwright Joe Orton and his lover (and eventual murderer) Kenneth Halliwell. The pair defaced dozens of Islington library books in the early 1960s, often using collage to comic effect. Four examples can be found in Islington Museum. While nobody would condone the disfigurement of public property, it's hard not to giggle at the results. The magistrate took a dimmer view. Orton and Halliwell were sentenced to six months in prison for their japery, which seems more than harsh. Orton put it down to homophobia.
Elsewhere, the venue covers all the usual bases you'd expect in a local museum. Crime and punishment, education, entertainment, a little about Arsenal FC, immigrant communities, the borough at war... All are covered with a breezy mix of text panels and objects, and the occasional audio file to listen into. A display on the recently closed Holloway Prison is particularly good.
Rather than telling a broad-brush history of the borough, the approach is typically one of drilling down into one specific location. For example, this cabinet contains the historical bric-a-brac recovered from just a single Islington address:
The collection comes from 53 Cross Street (a road connecting Upper Street and Essex Road). It includes centuries of detritus including walnut shells, a child's shoe, Victorian buttons and a gas mask mouthpiece. These humdrum objects may come from just one tiny corner of Islington, but they offer glimpses of wider society, across many generations.
As local history museums go, Islington's is wide-ranging, interesting even to non-residents and occasionally fun. Bold move, too, to place those defaced books right beneath the borough's main library.
Islington Museum, 245 St John St (down in the basement), London EC1V 4NB. Open Mon, Tue, Thu, Fri, Sat, 10am-5pm
