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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SOE Memorial, Albert Embankment

Violette Szabo in bronze, standing for the four hundred and seventy agents the Special Operations Executive sent into France, a hundred and seventeen of whom did not come back.

Memorials & plaquesFree

Photo by mattbuck ( category ), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Karen Newman's bust of Szabo - a Brixton shop girl who went to France twice, was captured after a gunfight, and was shot at Ravensbrück at twenty-three, the second woman to be awarded the George Cross - was unveiled on the riverside in 2009 by the Duke of Wellington as the national memorial to SOE, with the names of the countries its agents worked in around the plinth. It stands across the river from MI6 and a few yards from Lambeth Palace, where the walk from Westminster Bridge passes it.

Where
Albert Embankment, by Lambeth Palace, SE1 7SG
Nearest station
Lambeth North · 9 min walk

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