<![CDATA[ANDREW WHITEHEAD

<![CDATA[ANDREW WHITEHEAD - Blog]]>Mon, 17 Aug 2026 01:05:01 +0100Weebly<![CDATA[At the Angel: a Tom Paine pillar]]>Sun, 16 Aug 2026 16:42:21 GMThttps://www.andrewwhitehead.net/blog/at-the-angel-a-tom-paine-pillar

This is quite extraordinary. Tucked away amid a new development in the heart of Islington, just a few feet from The Angel tube station, is a pillar to that esteemed radical and freethinker, Tom Paine. Who knew?!! I certainly didn't until I stumbed acorss it the other day.

As pillars go, it's neither very old nor (to be candid) all that stylish. But a tribute to Tom Paine! Splendid!!

The Thomas Paine obelisk, to give the monument its formal title, was erected in 1991 to mark the bicentenary of Paine's most renowned book, The Rights of Man.

This was written, it's said, while Tom Paine lodged nearby at the long gone Angel Inn.

The artist was Kevin Jordan, and the pillar features a likeness of Tom ...

... and some of his wise words.

There's quite a competition to claim Tom Paine, with Thetford in Norfolk and Lewes in Eastr Sussex also in the market.

Islington's case would be stronger if anyone knew this obelisk was there. It's in Angel Square, just off Torrens Street.

If you exit The Angel tube heading north, take a right as soon as you are out of the station, and there it is.

]]><![CDATA[There goes the sun]]>Thu, 13 Aug 2026 18:35:26 GMThttps://www.andrewwhitehead.net/blog/there-goes-the-sun

It won't happen again in my lifetime - and the 90% solar eclipse visible in London last night was an event. Eclipse glasses sold out everywhere. The higher points of London - such as Parliament Hill and Highgate - attracted throngs of the curious.

This is what the sun looked like. I didn't manage to get safety glasses, but as I walked around at the height of the eclipse a kind soul lent me his glasses for a few seconds. And this (not my photo but lifted from the internet) is more-or-less what I saw.

My neighbours resorted to the colander method, using one to provide pin-hole camera images on a white sheet. Not bad!

On a piece of higher ground by the church close to my home, others were using much the same technology - though with a single pin-hole.

And how did that deliver? Well, take a look ...

There was quite a crowd by the church, though nothing like the assembly on the Heath. And the nice thing about the eclipse is it brought people together - a shared moment in an atomised world.

]]><![CDATA[Polly Binder pays a blinder]]>Wed, 15 Jul 2026 16:40:05 GMThttps://www.andrewwhitehead.net/blog/polly-binder-pays-a-blinder

Pearl Binder's family name was Binderofski. Her father, a tailor, moved to Britain from Eastern Europe in 1890. She was born in Salford fourteen years later.

She ended her life as Baroness Elwyn-Jones. Her husband, Elwyn Jones, was a barrister and Labour politician who, in 1964, became attorney-general. A decade later, he was appointed Lord Chancllor and made a life peer.

This blog is about Pearl Binder's art: politically committed, wonderfully humorous, sharply observed and deftly executed.

It's part of a much bigger - and enthusiatically recommended - 'Comrades in Art' exhibition at the Towner Gallery in (I know it's a strange location given the subject matter) Eastbourne.

Pearl Binder's drawings and lithographs depicting the Jewish East End of London in the early 1930s are particularly enthralling. Here we have 'Jewish Restaurant, Brick Lane' and 'Jewish Bookshop, Wentworth Street'.

She is known particuarly as a book illustrator. But she also wrote, sculpted, made stained glass ... and was a champion of the Pearly Kings and Queens, one of the enduring emblems of Cockney working class life in inner London.

She was also, in 1933, a founder member of the left-wing, communist leaning, Artists' International Association, which is the focus of this exhibition.

There is a mischief about her art which is really appealing. Take these examples -

If you can get down to the Towner Gallery, then go! The exhibition is on until October.

]]><![CDATA[A cold and creamy world first in Kentish Town]]>Sun, 05 Jul 2026 07:26:34 GMThttps://www.andrewwhitehead.net/blog/a-cold-and-creamy-world-first-in-kentish-town

It's not often Kentish Town gets a world first. But in Mamasons it has an ice cream store which proclaims itself 'the world's first Filipino ice cream parlour.

This does beg the question: are there really no ice cream parlours in the Philippines? But let's let that be.

The ice cream was yummy - creamy with very different (but gentle) tastes. I had the Ube, which is the one that looks like it's blueberry. The other one we tried is, I think, Pandesan, and that was good too.

Mamasons, by the way, is an abbreviation of 'Mama and Sons', and their ice cream brings a touch of class to the locality. And it's good value!

]]><![CDATA[Poplar's Untold Stories: Queenie and Francis]]>Sun, 28 Jun 2026 13:56:19 GMThttps://www.andrewwhitehead.net/blog/poplars-untold-stories-queenie-and-francis

This spectacular mural is on a gable wall in Poplar in London's East End. On the left is Queenie Watts, a singer, pianist and local pub landlady, particularly at the Iron Bridge Tavern on East India Dock Road. She died in 1980 and the pub is also long gone.

On the right is the acclaimed artist Francis Bacon, one of many painters, poets and actors who frequented this part of the London. Both have a connection to Poplar, an area of the East End which doesn't quite have the cachet of Spitalfields or Stepney, but which is worth the effort to get to know.

The historian Ken Worpole introduced me to the mural - and to Poplar - on a well-attended walk this weekend with the title 'High Rise and Low Life: a Poplar Journey'. Ken has a real enthusiasm for and knowledge of the area. One of his forbears is listed on a memorial to local parishioners who died in action during the First World War.

This part of the East End only has small clusters of ninteenth century buildings. It has been knocked around by wartime bombing and post-war slum clearance. It has several eye-catching murals and some really striking modern architecture, both high rise (such as Goldfinger's Balfron Tower) and the more initimate Aberfeldy New Village.

The Queenie Watts and Francis Bacon mural is the work of Zabou and JimmyC and is part of an 'Untold Stories' initiative supported by the Greater London Authority. Zabou's bird's eye view of is taken from his web page on the mural,

]]><![CDATA[Islay - a Scottish island in art and in real life]]>Sat, 27 Jun 2026 11:54:15 GMThttps://www.andrewwhitehead.net/blog/islay-a-scottish-island-in-art-and-in-real-life

This is the famous round church in Bowmore, the capital of Islay - in as much as a Scottish island of 3,000 people can have a capital. I visited it for the first time this month. But I feel as if it's a familiar part of my life.

I have had on my walls for many years two prints of Islay village-scapes by Nigel Abercrombie, I got these from my parents. I don't know for sure whether they ever visited Islay but I guess they did.

And it was wonderful to see this elegant 1760s Church of Scotland church dominating, brooding over, the tiny town of Bowmore.

On the other side of the sea loch is Port Charlotte, often described as the prettiest of Islay's handful of villages.

This was very much the view that Abercrombie had in 1977 when working on the piece of which formed the basis of his print. He has emphasised the geometrical aspect of the village scene, but as you can see it has hardly changed - indeed, it simply hasn't changed - in the past half century.

So here we have Islay in art and in real life. Both are enchanting.

]]><![CDATA[Light Shining in Buckinghamshire]]>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 16:45:41 GMThttps://www.andrewwhitehead.net/blog/light-shining-in-buckinghamshire

This is one of the most interesting and important radical pamphlets of them all. It dates from the period of the English Civil War - from 1649 to be precise (though it's dated 1648).

The pamphlet rails against Criown and church, the Norman yoke imposed upon the supposedly egalitarian Ango-Saxons, and the slavery resulting from the feudal system of landholding and the intense inequality that ensued. It's often described as presenting the views of the True Levellers or the Diggers, one of the more remarkable of the radical communitarian movements that briefly prospered in the immediate aftermath of the defeat of the Royalist army and the execution of Charles I.

The pamphlet provided the title for Caryl Churchill's 1976 play which dramatised the Putney Debates between rival factions of Cromwell's New Model Army.

]]><![CDATA[Half-a-million strong!]]>Fri, 22 May 2026 07:26:20 GMThttps://www.andrewwhitehead.net/blog/half-a-million-strong

Half-a-million! That's a big number.

Today my YouTube channel www.youtube.com/@awtv/videos hit 500,000 views in the eight years since I started posting.

There are some videos among the items posted. Most of it is audio - interviews I have conducted over the decades, and radio programmes I have made. A lot have an India aspect; many are the outcome of oral history about British radicalism.

Here are a couple of particularly memorable interviews about experiences of Partition in 1947

And here's a couple of really remarkable interviews about the British left. Enjoy!

]]><![CDATA[Don Juan of Clerkenwell]]>Thu, 21 May 2026 12:15:43 GMThttps://www.andrewwhitehead.net/blog/don-juan-of-clerkenwell

Say hello to Don Juan Ruiz de Vergara. This wonderful and very accomplished alabaster effigy of him (at least, we think it's him) lies in a Norman crypt in Clerkenwell. Not that this Don Juan ever set foot in Clerkenwell or anywhere nearby.

I said my own salaam to him during Clerkenwell Design Week. This is a brilliant event! It's free (though you have to register) and you get access to all sorts of wonderful hidden away places where exhibitors have taken space: this crypt, the stunning Old Sessions House on Clerkenwell Green, the underground cells of the Victorian Clerrkenwell House of Detention, that sort of thing.

And you can sometimes get offered a free glass of bubbly. Mind you, it's a three-day week. This year's event ends today.

The crypt is under the Priory Church of St John of Jerusalem in St John's Square, just a short stroll from Clerkenwell Green. It dates from the twelfth century.

Our Don Juan was a Castilian Knight Hospitaller who died fighting the Turks off the coast of Marseilles. The sixteenth century effigy may have been initially located in Valladolid Cathedral in Spain. It was transferred to Clerkenwell in 1914.

And the spookiest detail: yes, that is a child lying at Don Juan's feet. A grieving child? A young servant? Someone buried in the same tomb?

A detailed description says this is a 'sleeping page'. Let's hope so!

But Don Juan and his young friend lie in serene surroundings. if you can get a chance to visit this crypt, seize it!

]]><![CDATA['Finding Nanking, Where It Began']]>Thu, 23 Apr 2026 19:42:15 GMThttps://www.andrewwhitehead.net/blog/finding-nanking-where-it-began

Noor Zaheer

Andrew Whitehead

I was recently honoured to be asked to give a talk to Urdu Culture London and Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu UK about the spot where the Indian Progressive Writers' Association gathered for their first meeting.

Noor Zaheer had seen an earlier post on this site which prompted her to extend the invitation. She was sitting alongside me as I spoke about her father, the distinguished Urdu writer and leftist Sajjad Zaheer - and happily she confirmed the details of his personal life which I shared in the talk.

Here is the text of what I said:

The Nanking restaurant was in the basement, down those steep outside stairs

In the course of a few minutes I am going to take you on a journey in search of the birthplace of the Indian Progressive Writers Association – we’ll take in Little Tokyo, Tin Pan Alley, the Rolling Stones and Revolution. And we’ll end up at a now deserted basement not more than a mile from here.

The renowned Urdu writer, Sajjad Zaheer, in his reminiscences gave an account of the first meeting of the IPWA: 'A Chinese restaurant owner of London was very considerate towards us and used to offer the back room of his restaurant free of charge. This small, unventilated cellar could accommodate forty to fifty people with difficulty.’

The venue was the basement of the Nanking restaurant in Denmark Street - and the date, according to the scholar Carlo Coppola, was probably the evening of Saturday, 24 November, 1934.

Mulk Raj Anand says that it was at a meeting at the Nanking restaurant in the following year, 1935, that the Association’s historic manifesto was agreed
The first All-India Progressive Writers' Conference was held in Lucknow on 10 April 1936 under the leadership of Sajjad Zaheer.

But where was the long gone Nanking restaurant? Yes, Denmark Street – a short street off Charing Cross Road still associated with music and instruments - Tin Pan Alley as was, centre of the sheet music trade – before that Little Tokyo, hub of the small Japanese commuity in London – and earlier still a haunt of the radical O’Brienites, followers of the Chartist and socialist Bronterre O'Brien who met at the Eclectic Hall in Denmark Place and mustered alongside Karl Marx in the International Working Men's Association.

I come at this from two perspective: a keen interest in fiction set in London which has a strong sense of place, and Sajjad Zaheer’s novella ‘London ki ek raat’ is exactly that, in large part a lightly fictionalised account of the lives of Indian students and recent graduates in Bloomsbury in the mid-1930s. The Lucknow-based scholar, Madhu Singh, has written about the title on a website I set up, London Fictions.

My interest also arose because I was working on a biography of Freda Houlston – Freda Bedi – a woman from Derby from a non-privileged background who studied at Oxford in the early 1930s. There she met and married an Indian student and communist from Lahore, B.P.L. Bedi - and from that moment, long before she had set foot on Indian soil, decided that she was unequivocally Indian. She lived most of her adult life in India, died there, two of her sons live there today – one of them of course is the actor Kabir Bedi.

Oxford Mail, February 1933

At Oxford, Freda had two close friends: Barbara Betts, who became better known as Barbara Castle, and was really the first woman cabinet minister to make a big mark on British politics; and Olive Shapley, who became a broadcaster on the BBC notably as the host of Woman’s Hour on the radio.

Freda was emboldened to have an Indian boyfriend by her friend, Olive. At Oxford, Olive Shapley was a fervent class-against-class Communist and Olive’s boyfriend was ... Sajjad Zaheer. They never married of course nor intended to marry. I suspect Olive is the model for Sheila Green in Zaheer’s novella, who is told by her Indian boyfriend that he is returning home because he loves his country and its national cause even more than he loves her.

At Oxford, Zaheer was an evangelical communist. He took over the publication of the Oxford Indian students, Bharat, and turned it into a revolutionary publication. The only copy I’ve been able to trace is in the India Office Records. On the cover is the slogan: ‘Inquilab Zindabad’. It survives only because a British civil servant wanted to ban it and sent a copy to government lawyers for their view. They said it was, in effect, already illegal in India so no further action was needed.

Olive Shapley and Sajjad Zaheer remained on cordial terms. Indeed Olive’s son tells me that as a teenager he accompanied his mother to India, and they called on Sajjad Zaheer and his wife and daughters at their home in Delhi.

So let’s get back to Denmark Street. What do we know of the Nanking restaurant where the IPWA held its early meetings? Rather wonderfully there’s an account of the street from a visitor in 1932:

“….enter Denmark Street, which is now almost wholly given over to Chinese and Japanese restaurants and emporia. Undoubtedly the most amusing of these places is The Nanking, presided over by Mr. Fung Saw. Mr. Fung is some thing of a politician, and to his restaurant come many of the more youthful of the budding Parliamentarians. These, together with composers and song writers, their publishers and film artists, comprise the chief of Mr. Fung’s clientele. The hall of feasting is reached by long, steep steps, which lead to an exceptionally large, light, and lofty basement. ... Inside, the decorations are reminiscent of a Chinese junk, and the walls are decorated in vermilion and in greens and yellows, which only a Chinese artist is able to use to Oriental perfection.”

And where exactly was the Nanking restaurant? Well, a 1940 street directory answers that. It was at no. 4 Denmark Street, sharing the elegant six-storey building with a bookseller, a music publishers, a film casting agent and a commercial artist. And no, the street hasn't since been renumbered.

It was in the basement that Zaheer and his comrades met. So when I discovered that 4 Denmark Street was the spot, a decade back, I went round with my good friend Sam Miller. It was a bar, the Alley Cat, which promised live music nightly. When we navigated our way down the outside metal staircase and entered, there was no music and no other customers. The bartender told a story of tough times. The bar subsequently closed down.

That basement space is derelict today. There must be a business opportunity there. And it really deserves a blue plaque asthe birthplace of the IPWA..

The floors above became Regent Sounds Studios. Back in the day, they all recorded here: Hendrix, Elton John, Black Sabbath, the Kinks. The ground floor is now a shop specialising in electric guitars but the studio signage survives.

There’s a sign in the window saying that the Stones’ recorded ‘Not Fade Away’ here in 1964. You know the song, I'm sure. It goes: 'Your love for me has got to be real, Love is real and not fade away’.

Part of our common purpose today is to ensure that the progressive legacy of those who gathered in the basement of the Nanking restaurant all those decades ago does not fade away.

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