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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Cambridge Circus: le Carré's Circus

The junction that gave John le Carré's Secret Service its name: the Circus, headquarters of Smiley's people, in a building that was never there.

Bond & SmileyFree

Photo by Tom Morris, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and the rest of the Karla novels the Service is simply the Circus, after the crossroads where Shaftesbury Avenue meets Charing Cross Road, and its headquarters is an unnamed sooty building somewhere on it, with Control on the fifth floor and the lamplighters and scalphunters below. There is no such building - le Carré was borrowing the sound of the place - but the Palace Theatre's terracotta and the sweep of the roads are exactly the London of the books, and readers stand here and look up anyway.

Where
Cambridge Circus, WC2H 8HD
Nearest station
Leicester Square · 3 min walk

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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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