John Seed obituary

The Guardian

04-04-2025

My friend John Seed, who has died aged 74, was an author of poetry and history books and a long-serving lecturer at what is now the University of Roehampton. He was also an associate editor of Social History journal.
Among John's eight published collections of poems was That Barrikins (2007), which looked at the lives of London's long-gone working people, including costermongers, ballad sellers, coal heavers, sweepers, bird sellers, seamstresses and slop sellers. It fused history into verse in a way that was characteristic of John's status as a poet-historian. Iain Sinclair praised him for his 'close ear and neurotic sensitivity to the way a line breaks'.
Among John's history books were Marx; Guide for the Perplexed (2010) and Dissenting Histories (2008), a study of the writings of religious dissenters in England between the 1690s and the 1790s.
John was born in Chester-le-Street in County Durham, the eldest son of Mary (nee Carol), a paediatric nurse, and Alec, a merchant seaman. An altar boy at St Joseph's grammar school in Hebburn, he went on to St Jsoeph's sixth form college in Chester-le-Street, where he met Kathleen McTaff, whom he married in 1974.
After studying history and English at Portsmouth Polytechnic (now the University of Portsmouth), John spent a year on the dole living on the island of Lindisfarne in Northumberland, where he spent his time writing and reading.
Afterwards he taught history and cultural studies at the Sir Leo Schultz high school in Hull until in 1983 he became a history lecturer at Whitelands College in south-west London and then at the nearby Southlands College, both of which later became part of Roehampton University. He stayed at Southlands for the rest of his career, until retirement in 2010.
We first met when John came to read some of his poems at the Six Towns poetry festival, which I founded in Stoke on Trent in 1992. A witty man (the biography he submitted to the Cambridge poetry festival revealed that 'he recently had his hair cut'), he loved an argument, although his discussions were always tempered with empathy. He also liked to walk, and exhorted friends to join his treks across London and the home counties.
Kathleen and John had two children, Matthew and Gregory. Matthew, who had acute disabilities, died at the age of 20, and during his life they cared for him day and night.
He is survived by Kathleen and Gregory.