The Workers Museum

Why it is renowned

Condé Nast Traveler lists the Workers Museum among the best museums in Copenhagen, for its picture of everyday working-class life and its preserved 1950s rooms.¹ The building it occupies, raised by the workers themselves in 1879, is probably the oldest workers’ assembly hall in Europe.²³ Together with trades halls in Broken Hill and Melbourne in Australia and Ghent in Belgium, it is part of a joint nomination for the UNESCO World Heritage List sent to Paris in January 2026.³

The story

The first socialist labour movement in Denmark was founded in the summer of 1871, and its meetings in inns and dance halls were watched and broken up by the police.² After the Battle of Fælleden in 1872, workers began collecting money for a meeting house of their own, and the building at Rømersgade 22 was inaugurated on 23 April 1879.² A banquet hall and meeting rooms filled the rear building; the newspaper Social-Demokraten had its editorial office on the ground floor for 21 years, and the house was extended with the neighbouring property at no. 24 in 1920.² After the centenary in 1979, LO and the building's board dissolved the company that owned it and in 1982 set up the independent institution that became the museum.² The museum has been in the building since 1983.⁴ It also holds the Labour Movement Library and Archives, which dates from 1909.⁵ The Banquet Hall was restored in 2021, and conservators from the National Museum of Denmark recreated its large ceiling decoration of 1913.⁴ Among the exhibitions is a 1950s flat where a bricklayer, a hairdresser and their three children share a two-bedroom flat, beside a street of shops from the decade.⁶ Today it serves as Denmark's museum, archive and research library for democracy, community and working life.⁷

What to know it by

• The Banquet Hall⁴1879The hall at the heart of the assembly building, restored in 2021
• The 1950s⁶The Hansen family's flat and a street of shops from the decade
• Labour Movement Library and Archives⁵1909The archive and research library of the Danish labour movement