A stone’s throw from the British Museum’s imperial plunder stands a monument to an opposing source of power. Congress House, which has served as the headquarters of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) for over half a century, is one of the great physical testaments of the British labour movement.

Opened in 1958, the building was 14 years in the making, its existence mandated by workers’ delegates who passed a resolution in 1944 calling for a new centre of the organised workforce — a proud space that could not only honour the ‘supreme sacrifice’ trade unionists had made ‘in the successful prosecution of the war to overthrow the yoke of Nazi domination and the annihilation of the Nazi creed’, but also to encourage cultural development, training and participation among working people. A 1946 contest to determine the design saw 181 participants enter, with the Poplar-born architect David Du Roi Aberdeen winning out among the worker-judges voted on by their unions to call the decision.

The choice of Aberdeen’s design lived up to the winning motion of a building that would be ‘fitting to the dignity and propagation of the great ideals for which the Movement stands’. Centred on a conference hall built to hold large union delegations and surrounded with offices, meeting rooms, a library and catering hall, its curved glass, lightness and open space resembles many of Le Corbusier’s unrealised design sketches. The building’s wood was donated by fraternal unions from across the globe, its street facings shaped from Cornwall granite slabs as a meaningful gesture of solidarity with Cornish communities confronting souring economic prospects.

Central to the building is Jacob Epstein’s 1957 striking pietà of a mother carrying her lifeless son — a work decrying war’s needless human degradation, described in a contemporary TUC internal document as ‘a memorial for the dead and an act of faith for the living’. At the entrance to the building is ‘The Spirit of Brotherhood’ by the communist artist and Henry Moore protégé Bernard Meadows, a bronze physical representation of the principle of solidarity — of the strong supporting the weak. All construction work was completed and overseen by union members; even at its formal opening, the Royal Horse Guards invited to perform a fanfare were made Musicians Union members for the occasion.

Congress House was one of many major institutions the labour movement built and maintained in the twentieth century. Often (though not exclusively) to be found in railway-adjacent clusters of central London, the buildings which historian Nick Mansfield referred to as ‘castles of organised labour’ were made to demonstrate the presence of trade unions to an official society only recently registering their existence, power and principles, as well as to show physical confidence in their humane principles, and the positive change that will arise with their inevitable realisation.

But last month, it was decided by the TUC that Congress House can vanish. In a decision taken by its internal finance committee, it was agreed that the TUC leadership begin searching for a potential buyer. After having survived the Thatcher government’s assault on organised workers after having being granted Grade II-listed status as a ‘building of special architectural interest’, the document shows constant repeated references to the need for a ‘modern fit-for-purpose’ building, as well as routine questioning of the ‘strategic’ purpose of maintaining the building (the vaguely stated mission of the TUC in the document is to ‘support unions to grow and thrive’ and ‘to stand up for everyone’).

The decision will likely see 40 catering workers, receptionists and other staff losing their jobs, with their current employment status unclear (a petition is being circulated to urge the TUC to consider alternatives). It also means that a building whose existence was purely determined by union workers democratically mandating it, physically constructing it, aesthetically shaping it, and appealing for assistance in its realisation by union workers from across the world, will soon be likely to fall into the hands of the private developers gobbling up the capital (this is without expressing concern for the future of Epstein and Meadows’ art).

Though news of the sale sent ripples of concern through the labour movement and wider society, it was not a wholly shocking move. In its heyday, the TUC’s attitude was that organised workers needed to exert a degree of political and organisational sovereignty. Everything from the drafting of policy documents to entire parallel sets of institutions — from holiday institutions to media operations — poured pressure on the TUC. The labour movement’s core social identity and perspectives were too important to be outsourced to MPs; separate assets and forms of advocacy were needed that could demonstrate a social weight for workers the Parliamentary Labour Party must consider in its political manoeuvring.

There is no shortage of examples. In the 1930s, the TUC ventured into the commercial media with the global best-selling newspaper, the Daily Herald, of which it owned a 49 percent stake; its social power can’t be more starkly emphasised than in the fact that once they gave up their shares, it became The Sun. Three decades later, initiatives like Centre 42 (named after the number of a successful Congress resolution) organised cultural activities in workplaces and created London’s Roundhouse venue, which saw the TUC curating some of the sixties’ epochal cultural moments.

It would be very difficult to imagine the TUC coming out with initiatives such as these today, which has seemingly abandoned the notion that the organisation should muster its own strength, influence and presence (and often exhibits a peculiar incuriosity towards those advocates on its own side). Presumably, it is hoped that instead of marshalling the strength of workers and their institutions, a few private words and friendships forged over conference drinks with Labour frontbenchers will do for winging pro-worker policies into reality.

But the realities of knowing disappointment in the TUC does not fully prepare for the end of Congress House, a symbolic moment of selling off the family silver. All it will highlight is how ‘sensible’ choices such as these are really borne of unenthusiastic structures that are unfit for purpose in tackling the current challenges and future aspirations of workers in this country, and a harsh signal of how, at a time where many unions seem to be struggling to maintain relevance, the leading structures of the movement also seem to be losing their sense of self.

There is simply no way that with some thought, direction and energy, Congress House couldn’t find new relevance (and healthy profit). It is habitual for trade unionists to quote Keir Hardie, who once wrote that the labour movement’s daily aspirations must ‘throb with the life of the days that are to be’. The working-class movement put the proverbial meat on the bones of this language with places such as Congress House because they knew that the workers they represented were worthy of it; abandoning institutions like these is a more than tacit concession of what you think the height of workers’ aspirations should be, or what working people do and do not deserve.