The Whiteway Anarchists in the Twentieth Century: a transnational community in the Cotswolds

This article traces the later history of the Whiteway anarchist community in Gloucestershire. The sole survivor of the various communal experiments of the latter half of the nineteenth-century, the Whiteway colony was a bohemian enclave that attracted political militants, draft-dodgers, exponents of colonial separatism, and cultural and religious dissidents in exile from Europe. In common with other settlements of this nature in Europe and North America, Whiteway received considerable voyeuristic and prurient attention from the state, police, anti-vice activists and near neighbours. This article examines the mythology surrounding Whiteway, and considers the arguments about its later significance in the twentieth century. Locating the community in the traditions of political protest, it relates the history of Whiteway to broader debates about the role of alternative cultures within British popular politics and memory. Re-examining Whiteway’s reputation for the exotic and the aberrant, this article unearths previously unused documents about the colony to reassess the changing moral and political attitudes towards the community displayed by reformers and anti-reformers at the beginning of the twentieth-century.