Lenin was once a Londoner who hated the weather and loved riding the bus

Lenin's pad was just off Clerkenwell Green, a meeting point for revolutionaries in London.
Lenin's pad was just off Clerkenwell Green, a meeting point for revolutionaries in London. Copyright Steph Bosset
By Stephanie Bosset
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Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov spent just over a year at a tiny flat near Kings Cross

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When Vladimir Lenin and his wife Nadya arrived at London's Charing Cross station in 1902 it was to escape arrest in Munich, where the pair had been living in exile.

Travelling under the names of Dr and Mrs Jacob Richter, they would stay in the capital for just over a year, living in a small flat close to Kings Cross.

It is during his time in London that Lenin worked at 37a Clerkenwell Green, now the Marxist Memorial Library, and focused on his political work and wrote for the radical newspaper The Spark - Iskra in Russian - printed in the building's basement. The paper was aimed at exiled or emigrant Russians.

It wouldn't be Lenin's last stay in London. Within a few months of his departure in 1903, he came back, undercover, for a very secretive conference of the Russian Social and Democratic Labour Party. He would visit several more times until his last visit in late 1911.

Following the October Revolution in 1917, Lenin became the leader of Soviet Russia and then the Soviet Union.

Watch the video about Lenin's former office in the player above.

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