Andrew Whitehead

The Whittington hospital in north London is much improved. The new wing is light and spacious. The A+E is as friendly and efficient as an inner city casualty ward can be. But spending a Sunday morning at the Whittington isn't anyone's idea of fun.

The saving grace is the wonderful architecture hidden within the hospital grounds.

And above all, there's the majesty of the double-fronted Smallpox and Vaccination Hospital - not visible from the road, but well worth a wander through the maze of Whittington buildings.

The Smallpox and Vaccination Hospital dates from 1848-50 - an Italianate design by Samuel Dawkes (that information lifted from the Camden History Society's excellent Streets of Highgate). The hospital was earlier at Kings Cross, but was displaced by the building of the station.

Two workhouse infirmaries were later built in the same area - one, an equally splendid design just across Dartmouth Park Hill, is now the Highgate Mental Health Centre. You can get a good view of the main infirmary building from Waterlow Park, next door. Highgate cemetery is also very close at hand.

The Whittington was created at the time of the birth of the NHS in 1948 - bringing together Highgate Hospital, on the current main site and including the Smallpox and Vaccination Hospital, with the two former workhouse infirmaries.

This distinctly dated photo of the Smallpox Hospital - used for many decades as a nurses' home - is from the history page of the Whittington's website.

The name of course comes from the Dick Whittington legend. The Whittington stone, where young Dick was prompted to 'turn, turn and turn again' back to London, is nearby on Highgate Hill.

Four years ago I wrote a book. It's about how the Kashmir conflict started in 1947. A Mission in Kashmir was published in India and did rather well there. It's now out of print, and as a service to the world I have posted the full text on line.

The book was never published in Britain - and although it was, and is, available online (from Amazon for instance), it was never distributed in bookshops over here. So while I have had the pleasure of seeing my book on sale in Delhi, Srinagar and elsewhere, I've never seen it in a bookshop in the UK.

Until today. When I came across a copy in the Oxfam bookshop in Highgate. Priced at £4. I am curious to know how that copy got there, but it was nice to see it on the shelves.

But my dilemma - do I buy it myself or not. I have a few copies left, but not all that many. And I do keep doling out copies to those with an interest in the subject. And it is a bargain price (though the India cover price isn't that much higher).

What did I decide? Yes, there is now another copy of A Mission in Kashmir in my study. 

Every so often, I spend a weekend afternoon trawling round second-hand bookshops and what you might call vintage shops in search of, well, anything that attracts my interest. Today was my winter wander - around Highgate and Archway, taking in two good charity shops, Oxfam and Mind, the excellent Ripping Yarns near Highgate tube, and the always intriguing Green Room down Archway Road.

This is my favourite purchase - bought entirely because of the wonderful, and gloriously dated, cover. It came out in 1929, don't you know. It's sub-titled 'a handbook for electors', and was clearly aimed at the new women's vote (women only got the vote on the same terms as men, I believe, in 1928).

The principal author was Amabel Williams-Ellis - whose father, John Strachey, was editor of the 'Spectator' and similarly named brother dallied variously with communism, socialism and Oswald Mosley.

This too I bought largely because of the remarkable cover. The book is by a Zionist writer, Izak Goller - 'stark, undiluted melodrama', in his words - and was published by the Ghetto Press in London in 1931.

Goller co-founded the press 'to provide both the Jewish and non-Jewish English reading public with modern Anglo-Jewish literature.'

It is, to me at least, a bibliographic curiosity - in great condition, and hardly expensive at a tenner. If anyone knows anything more about the author or indeed the symbolical importance of the revolt of the Maccabees, do let me know.

Richard Acland's Forward March - published in 1941, with a remarkably dull cover - was a key step in the foundation that year of Common Wealth, a radical (slightly libertarian) party which went on to win a series of wartime Parliamentary by-elections.

Acland was a Liberal MP and a Christian progressive who allied with the author J.B. Priestley and a former communist Tom Wintringham to set up Common Wealth. It was a remarkable phenomenon but collapsed very quickly with the return to peacetime politics. The last vestiges of the party survived into the 1990s.

All the books came from Ripping Yarns. At the Green Room, I bought some intriguing bagdes. The 'silver' badge I got - for a very modest amount - because I though it was a Common Wealth badge or tie pin. Their emblem was a 'W' inside a 'C'. I'm now not so sure.

I had no idea what the S.U.M. was - though the badge is very striking. I suspect after sleuthing round the interent that it stands for the Sudan United Mission - bringing the gospel to the 'dark' continent, and all that.

Anyway, that's what I did during my afternoon wander. I hope you approve.