The Working Class Movement Library records over 200 years of organising and campaigning by ordinary men and women. The collection provides a rich insight into working people's daily lives as well as their thoughts, hopes, fears and the roles they played in the significant events of their time. It began in the 1950s as the personal collection of Edmund and Ruth Frow. As they discovered the extent of material associated with working class history, in Ruth’s words, ‘although we always maintained that we were a library and not a museum, we found ourselves collecting museum artefacts’. And people responded to the Frows’ generosity in welcoming people into their home to use the books, pamphlets and archive material there. Thus donations of ceramics, banners, sculpture and paintings were offered alongside books, and never turned down, to the point where the Frows’ house reached bursting point. In 1987 Salford Council offered to house the magnificent library in a Victorian building on Salford Crescent. The collection has been there ever since, and is free for everyone to use.