Manchester University is facing criticism for refusing to remove books written by Holocaust denier David Irving from open display or to an area where students would have to ask to read them.

Dr Irene Lancaster, formerly a teaching fellow in Jewish history at Manchester University, and the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, now master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, have led a campaign across British universities to have the controversial writer’s books reclassified.

In recent months Cambridge and University College London (UCL), have relabelled works by the controversial writer to make clear his record as a Holocaust denier.

But Manchester has so far refused a request to act.

Dr Lancaster, whose grandmother died at the Treblinka concentration camp, said leaving Irving’s books on open display was a threat to the safety of Jewish students and staff at a time when antisemitic hate crime was on the rise across Europe.

She said: “Leaving this literature on open shelving with inadequate labelling poses a physical threat to the Jewish student and staff body and constitutes a deep insult to the lives of all those who were exterminated in the Nazi Holocaust.”

Manchester defended its position on the grounds of freedom of speech and said it had surveyed more than 20 university libraries and that its “approach was consistent with theirs”.

In a statement the university added: “However, we do recognise that these works are controversial, so that the context in which they are placed is significant. With this in mind we have taken the decision to reclassify them from ‘history’ to ‘historical studies’.”

UCL said it had decided to move some of the books to an off-site store, and to move others “from their regular place alongside works of serious scholarship to the historiography section”.

It is also going to add the label “Holocaust denial literature” to catalogue records for all copies of Irving’s books “where appropriate”.

In 2000 Irving lost a libel battle against historian Deborah Lipstadt after she described him as a “Holocaust denier”.

Last week the Campaign Against Antisemitism failed in a bid to get Manchester University to insert a disclaimer into the books describing them as Shoah denial literature