Siege of Sidney Street

![1900 map of Jewish East London. Circled on the left of the map is the location of the Houndsditch murders; circled on the right is the location of 10 Sidney Street.The map is coloured to show the density of Jewish residents in East London: the darker the blue, the higher the Jewish population.[lower-alpha 1]](/uploads/202502/11/The_Jew_in_London_–_A_study_of_racial_character_and_present-day_conditions_(cropped_and_annotated)1037.jpg)


The Siege of Sidney Street of January 1911, also known as the Battle of Stepney, was a gunfight in the East End of London between a combined police and army force and two Latvian revolutionaries. The siege was the culmination of a series of events that began in December 1910, with an attempted jewellery robbery at Houndsditch in the City of London by a gang of immigrant Latvians which resulted in the murder of three policemen, the wounding of two others, and the death of George Gardstein, the leader of the Latvian gang.