ON a December night in 1911, the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, had to deal with a deadly stand-off between police and burglars in east London.

Long before he became the MP for Woodford and 30 years before he made his famous 'The Few' speech about the airmen of the Battle of Britain, Churchill took centre stage during the Siege of Sidney Street, which is the subject of a new exhibition, London Under Siege: Churchill And The Anarchists, at The Museum of London Docklands.

The siege came two weeks after the robbery of a nearby jewellers in Houndsditch, when three policemen were shot dead and two were disabled for life.

Two members of the gang of Latvian revolutionaries who had attempted to break into the jewellers had gone into hiding in a flat in Sidney Street and were surrounded by more than 200 armed police officers.

Churchill ordered back-up from the Scots Guards and when the flat the Latvian gunmen were hiding in burst into flames, he stopped the fire brigade from extinguishing it.

The two dead gunmen were later found inside the building – one on the first floor, where he had been shot and the other on the ground floor, where he had died from smoke inhalation.

The Museum of London's exhibition will look at Churchill's role in the siege, which many accused him of overplaying to gain political popularity.

The overcoat he was wearing on the day will be on display and the curator of Social and Working History at the museum, Julia Hoffbrand, said she hoped to find the top hat he was wearing as well.

“It may still exist somewhere and it would be really interesting to find it,” she said. “So if anyone has a battered top hat in their attic, please let us know.”

Weapons belonging to the gunmen, newsreel and eyewitness accounts from the day of the siege will also be on show, as well as the orders of service from the funerals of the murdered policemen.

The museum is running the exhibition in partnership with the Jewish East End Celebration Society.

One of the society's members, Clive Bettington, said: “The siege of Sidney Street is part of East End and socialist folklore and the area at the time was home to radical political groups, most of whom had come from Eastern Europe, thus helping exaggerate people's imaginations about immigration and other cultures.”

London Under Siege: Churchill And The Anarchists opens on December 18 and runs until April 2011 at the Museum of London Docklands in West India Quay. Entry is free.