ANDREW WHITEHEAD

The top pages, images of Kashmir from 1947 ... Partition Voices ...
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Curious Muswell Hill
=Andrew Whitehead=

published by Five Leaves, May 2025
Muswell Hill is a model of the Edwardian middle-class suburb, with its broad streets, regal street names, arts-and-crafts houses and fashionable shopping parades. But look a little harder and you'll find the trace of aristocratic Russian anarchists, God-fearing African revolutionaries and insurrectionary Indian nationalists. The Kinks grew up here and made the locality almost cool with their 'Muswell Hillbillies' album. Fairport Convention started rehearsing in a house on Fortis Green from which they took their name. Muswell Hillbilly Brewers use N10 hops, grown in back gardens in Colney Hatch Lane, to add magic to their Tetherdown pale ale.

In Curious Muswell Hill, historian Andrew Whitehead takes an affectionate - and mildly subversive - tour round N10. A detailed map will help you find your way around Muswell Hill's curiosities and there's lots of photographs ancient and modern.

A Devilish Kind of Courage: Anarchists, Aliens and the Siege of Sidney Street
=Andrew Whitehead=

published by Reaktion Books
On 3 January 1911, in the heart of London’s mainly Jewish East End, police discovered Latvian revolutionaries wanted for the murder of three officers. A six-hour gunfight ensued, with a fire consuming the besieged building. Winston Churchill, then Home Secretary, arrived at the scene and ordered the blaze not to be extinguished. Afterwards two charred bodies were found; the elusive Peter the Painter, believed to have been the ringleader, remained at large.

This gripping episode, known as the ‘Siege of Sidney Street’, was a nationwide sensation and ignited fierce debates on immigration to Britain, political extremism and law enforcement. This book unravels the full story of the siege, the Latvian émigrés and their ties to the vibrant anarchist movement in London’s East End.

REVIEWS

'Through careful use of police documents, as well as reports in the contemporary Yiddish press, Whitehead renders their [Latvian anarchists'] world in vivid detail: the reader sees the cheap furniture in rented rooms lit by sputtering gas lamps, the love affairs that would sometimes blossom briefly between comrades, and the details of their shared dreams about transforming their homeland.' - TLS

'With its themes of immigration, xenophobia, antisemitism and foreign atrocities on English soil, Whitehead's book is contemporary and relevant. His meticulous research is lightly worn
in a book that propels the reader forward in lively, elegant prose.' - The Critic

'brilliantly recounts the events' - Camden New Journal

'[This] well-researched and detailed book looks like being the definitive study' - Socialist Standard

'The book has certainly renewed my interest in East End Jewish Radicals before the First World War
and brings a human side to an important period in working-class politics in East London.
I would thoroughly recommend it.' - Socialist History

'a master class in social history' - Policing and Society

Welcome!

I am a historian, lecturer and freelance journalist after 35 years with the BBC as a correspondent, presenter and Editor of BBC World Service News. I am an honorary professor at the University of Nottingham; I teach American undergraduates in London for Global Education Oregon; I'm also a visiting professor at the Asian College of Journalism in Chennai, south India.

My biography of Freda Bedi was published in 2019 - more here! And the latest of my titles about Curious London is out too.

This website is about my enthusiasms, interests and the issues and topics which have caught my attention. These range from contemporary Kashmir to my collections of political pamphlets and badges.

I've also posted on the site listings of my interviews with those who lived through Partition in South Asia, my recordings of British political activists, a visual record of Kashmir in the turbulent year of 1947, and the audio of some of my radio documentaries and oral history.

There's a blog too - do take a look. And I'd be keen to hear from you about the site - here's where you can contact me. Thanks for paying my website a visit - do come again.

Andrew Whitehead