Since then, restoration and maintenance of the old building have continued. The chief attraction of the Assembly Hall is undoubtedly the great Banqueting Hall. When the museum moved in, the Banqueting Hall had suffered much wear and tear and was marred by misguided efforts to modernize it. The museum’s first major initiative was to restore the Banqueting Hall to the way it had looked in the early years of the 20th century. Today we consider the Banqueting Hall to be the most important and largest ‘exhibit’ of the museum.

In some cases the Workers’ Museum has received donations of whole interiors. For instance in 1989 the museum was made the sole heir of a fully furnished one-family house in the Copenhagen suburb Rødovre. In 1990 an offer was made to the museum for a fully furnished flat at Kalkbrænderivej in Copenhagen. I became clear that the elderly lady who had been living in the flat since she moved in with her parents and siblings in 1915 had literally made no changes to the flat’s interior. Therefore, the flat was a vivid illustration of housing conditions in the early years of the 20th century. The many everyday objects which have been donated to the museum in this way enable us to narrate the history of daily life then in an absorbing and vivid way.

Working life is another focal point of our collection activities. The museum acquired a lot of artefacts when the Copenhagen Naval Dockyard and the Holmen Naval Station were closed down in the early 1990s; similar collection activities were made from the Smithy and Machine Shop of the Copenhagen Harbour in the 1990s. When the department store Daells closed its doors in 1999, the Workers’ Museum together with the National Museum and The Museum of Copenhagen made an in-depth examination of this old department store and collected everything from counters to packaging so as to be able document the department store as a place of work.

The trade unions are a natural collection field for the Workers’ Museum. When the Workers’ Museum moved into the old Assembly Hall, some of the flats were still used as trade union offices, and in 1985 the museum took over the almost completely intact offices of the Precious Metal Workers’ Union when it moved out of the Assembly Hall. In connection with the merger between the Workers’ Museum and the Library and Archive of the Labour Movement (ABA) in 2004, a number of the exhibits which the ABA had received over the years in connection with collecting the archives of trade unions were transferred to the museum. For this reason the Workers’ Museum is now the proud owner of a number of ‘chairman’s bells’, commemorative cups, ashtrays and lots of other objects produced on the occasion of various jubilees celebrated by different trade unions. In connection with the merger, the Workers’ Museum acquired a large collection of objects belonging to Thorvald Stauning (1873-1942), Denmark’s first and longest serving social-democratic prime minister. The collection encompasses many personal effects. Stauning was, however, also an avid collector of such ‘souvenirs’ as bottle-openers and nutcrackers produced with him as the subject.

The Workers’ Museum has also collected a number of items that derive from the o-operative Movement, the Society of enterprises established by the trade union movement. Most of these enterprises no longer exist and in connection with their closure the museum received exhibits from the brewery ‘Stjernen’ and the dairy plant ‘Enigheden’.