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The Women's Library, the oldest and most extensive collection on women's history in Europe, is about to open its doors again in what campaigners hope will be a permanent home, after almost a century of repeatedly having to pack up and move a unique archive of books, letters, diaries, magazines, protest banners, pamphlets and photographs.
Although the London School of Economics, whose founders shared many of the radical ideals of the women who started the library, has pledged to care for the collection and keep it open to members of the public as well as academics, the move was bitterly contentious to some.
The library lost its purpose-built home, an old East End washhouse transformed with Heritage Lottery money, two years ago when the London Metropolitan University said it could no longer afford to run it.
A formal opening ceremony for its new home, a handsome fourth-floor reading room within the LSE library, with speakers including the former Irish president and UN high commissioner Mary Robinson, will be held on Wednesday, and it will open to the public at the end of the month.
The director of library services at LSE, Elizabeth Chapman, said the university was privileged to take in an important part of Britain's heritage. "We are committed to ensuring that the collection becomes available to as many people as possible. The fantastic facilities being opened for the Women's Library during 2014 are a demonstration of this, and we are delighted to be able to provide access to the most extensive collection of women's history in Europe alongside our already world-class collections on the social sciences."
Previous users and supporters will be keeping a careful watch on how the LSE cares for the collection and whether it manages to preserve a place where, as one researcher said, "academics and activists meet".
A petition against the closure of its old home, backed by the trade union movement, attracted more than 12,000 signatures and its adoption by the LSE was described by one letter writer to the Guardian as not a rescue but "an abduction".
Laura Schwartz, assistant professor of modern British history at Warwick, which was part of the campaign to save the library, said: "The Women's Library was always a 'living library' used by activists, researchers and members of the public – not just historians and academics. Will its dynamic legacy as both scholarly and political resource survive? That depends upon whether the LSE continues outreach work with local schools and women's groups, and on whether it protects the Women's Library independent identity as a feminist space open to anyone wishing to learn about the past, present and future struggle for liberation."
Schwartz added: "Fortunately, the Women's Library has supporters all over the world keen to help the LSE make this happen."
The LSE is unusual among university libraries in giving public access to general readers, and said the Women's Library will be more accessible than ever in its new home – and the collection is also gradually being digitised. Much of the collection will be on open shelving near the 40-seat reading room and an exhibition space for treasures, and later this year a ground floor exhibition space will open, free to anyone without a reader's ticket.
The collection includes the return half of a train ticket from Epsom to Victoria and the tiny shabby purse that held it, proving to some that Emily Davison only intended to publicise the cause of the suffragettes by stopping the king's horse at the 1913 Derby, not to die under its hooves.
Flimsy-typed pages are the only original surviving records of the first UK Women's Liberation Conference, held at Ruskin College in Oxford in 1970, which voted for equal pay and education, free contraception and abortion on demand, and 24-hour state nurseries so that any woman could return to work.
From just two years later there is the first copy of the feminist magazine Spare Rib, now too rare and fragile to be given out to readers, which sold for 17 1/2 pence and included articles on the government's attitude to pensioners and one on "Growing up in the Bosom Boom" – and more surprisingly, "Georgie Best on Sex".
Although the origins of the library lie in the late 19th-century campaign for women's suffrage, and the first librarian was appointed in 1926, it contains far older books including a 1695 volume on education for women, titled A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest, one of the earliest on the subject. By 1804 the book seems to have belonged to somebody called George Jones who covered the opening pages with scribbles, doodles and sums.
There are also more than 100 campaign banners and the original designs for some by members of the Artists' Suffrage League. A battered copy of the collected poems of Shelley is also a treasure: it was brought into Holloway prison by the artist Katie Gliddons, who was denied writing materials but managed to smuggle in a pencil: any blank pages in the volume are covered in drawings of the prison and her prison journal.
The library was originally housed in a converted pub in Westminster, which suffered bomb damage in the second world war, was taken over from the cash strapped Fawcett Society in 1977 by the City of London Polytechnic, which later became part of the London Metropolitan University, and finally moved in 2002 to the washhouse in Aldgate, whose transformation with a £4.2m Heritage Lottery grant won an architectural prize. It was intended as its final and permanent home, but it barely lasted 10 years.
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