The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power

Chapter 8 explores the controversies surrounding streets named in honor of revolutionary figures. Pedram Moallemian was an Iranian man who grew up in Tehran in the late 1970s, when the revolutionary spirit dominated Iran. When Moallemian was a teenager, he and his friends painted over a sign for Winston Churchill Street—the location of the British Embassy in Tehran—so that it read Bobby Sands Street, in honor of an Irish Republican Army (IRA) revolutionary. Sands, who was arrested for attempting to bomb a furniture store, died while on a hunger strike in a British prison.

For Moallemian and many young Iranians, Bobby Sands represented much-needed resistance to British colonial power. Like the Irish, the people of Iran were intimately familiar with British abuses of power: In 1953, the British and American governments helped engineer a coup against a democratically elected leader. As a result of popular support for Sands, Moallemian’s youthful prank had a lasting impact, as the people of Tehran informally accepted the name. Shortly after, city officials formalized the change. As a result, the British embassy chose to add a new entrance on a different street to avoid naming an anti-colonial revolutionary every time they gave their address.

Moallemian’s act of renaming belongs to a long tradition of street signs memorializing revolutionaries.