Save the Feminist Library from Eviction!

Southwark Council are threatening to evict the Feminist Library from the building on Westminster Bridge Rd, London, that has been its home for 30 years.

The council have given notice that the rent on the Library’s space in the building, which has housed a variety of community groups alongside the Library for the past 30 years, will be raised from £12,000 to £30,000 a year. Council officers are refusing to negotiate - join us in calling upon them to work with us to save the Library.

On 10th February, Southwark Council Cabinet approved a report that ‘highlights the need for a thriving VCS (Voluntary and Community Sector) that mobilises community action and makes best use of community resources, skills, knowledge and spaces’. We cannot understand how treating our organisation in such a way is consistent with approving this report. [1]

Dr Laura Schwartz, Associate Professor of Modern British History, University of Warwick has said: ‘"The Feminist Library is a wonderful cultural resource that needs to be defended at all costs. Generations of my students have used it for their academic research, as well as informing themselves about the continued oppression of women in our society and how to fight against it. The Library is now the only archive in London where a wide array of feminist publications are truly accessible to the general public and available on the open shelves. It also provides one of the few spaces in central London where women and feminist activists can come together to meet and organise for a better world. If the Feminist Library is evicted from its current premises, Southwark Council will not only be guilty of cultural vandalism but also of silencing women."

Learn more about the Feminist Library and donate to our Emergency fund here: http://feministlibrary.co.uk/support/emergencyfund/

About the Feminist Library:

The Feminist Library has an incomparable collection of over 7,000 books, 1500 periodical titles from around the world, archives of feminist individuals and organisations, pamphlets, papers, posters, and ephemera. We also provide space for meetings, readings, exhibitions and events, a space which supports and encourages research, mutual support, activism and community projects, with well over 20 different groups having used the events space just in the past calendar year, a number of them national and international. We are volunteer led, as we have been all our life; we are intergenerational, being significant custodians of our feminist heritage, whilst looking to the future; and our approach is intersectional – we provide a space for different feminisms to co-exist. We support not just archiving work, but also publish our own zines and support independent producers and artists. We are a registered charity, and completely self-funding.

[1] Details of report http://casouthwark.org.uk/focus-southwark/southwark-council-agrees-new-voluntary-sector-strategy ‘Southwark Council Agrees to New Voluntary Sector Strategy’