The council is threatening to close down London’s feminist library

Southwark Council’s rent hike is threatening London’s Feminist Library. In order to stay open, the council wants an increase in rent of £18,000 by 1 March: from £12,000 to £30,000 a year. The gender pay gap strikes again (ish). And March is Women’s History Month.

“I am to linked to the library on quite a personal level,” Magda Oljejor, 22, from Croydon told us. “It’s the first place in London where I discovered feminism in action. It is the only space of it’s kind here, and it’s loss is just another symptom of a wider problem which is austerity, with a lot of community and women’s spaces being lost.”

Fans of the library have set up a petition to save it, which has almost 3,500 signatures at the time of writing.

Dr Laura Schwartz, a Professor of Modern British History at Warwick, 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. 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.”