Secrets & Espionage

Where the state kept its secrets and where the spies were made up: the bugged mansion, the bunkers, the headquarters you can only look at, the memorials to the agents, and the addresses of Bond and Smiley.

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64 Baker Street: SOE headquarters

The Baker Street Irregulars: headquarters of the Special Operations Executive, which ran resistance and sabotage across occupied Europe from an ordinary office block.

HeadquartersMemorials & plaquesFree

Photo by Kyle Glover, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Churchill's order to set Europe ablaze was carried out from here between 1940 and 1946 - the agents, the parachute drops, the wireless sets, the exploding rats - by an organisation the rest of Whitehall resented and Eisenhower credited with shortening the war; Colin Gubbins ran it from the fourth floor, and the agents themselves were never allowed in, being briefed instead in a flat at Orchard Court on Portman Square with a famous black-tiled bathroom. The plaque went up in 2010, unveiled by Gubbins's wartime secretary. The Sherlock Holmes museum is up the same road, which is where the nickname came from.

Where
64 Baker Street, W1U 7DJ
Nearest station
Baker Street · 5 min walk

An office building; the plaque is on the front.

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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.

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