The Lawn Road Flats: Spies, Writers and Artists

History of British Intelligence

by David Burke

The Isokon building, Lawn Road Flats, in Belsize Park on Hampstead's lower slopes, is a remarkable building. The first modernist building in Britain to use reinforced concrete in domestic architecture, its construction demanded new building techniques. But the building was as remarkable for those who took up residence there as for the application of revolutionary building techniques. There were 32 Flats in all, and they became a haunt of some of the most prominent Soviet agents working against Britain in the 1930s and 40s, among them Arnold Deutsch, the controller of the group of Cambridge spies who came to be known as the "Magnificent Five" after the Western movie The Magnificent Seven; the photographer Edith Tudor-Hart; and Melita Norwood, the longest-serving Soviet spy in British espionage history. However, it wasn't only spies who were attracted to the Lawn Road Flats, the Bauhaus exiles Walter Gropius, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Marcel Breuer; the pre-historian V. Gordon Childe; and the poet (and Bletchley Park intelligence officer) Charles Brasch all made their way there. A number of British artists, sculptors and writers were also drawn to the Flats, among them the sculptor and painter Henry Moore; the novelist Nicholas Monsarrat; and the crime writer Agatha Christie, who wrote her only spy novel N or M? in the Flats. The Isokon building boasted its own restaurant and dining club, where many of the Flats' most famous residents rubbed shoulders with some of the most dangerous communist spies ever to operate in Britain. Agatha Christie often said that she invented her characters from what she observed going on around her. With the Kuczynskis - probably the most successful family of spies in the history of espionage - in residence, she would have had plenty of material. DAVID BURKE is a historian of intelligence and international relations and author of The Spy Who Came In From the Co-op: Melita Norwood and the Ending of Cold War Espionage (The Boydell Press, 2009).

Genres: London, Espionage, Nonfiction, History

309 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

DAVID BURKE is a historian of intelligence and international relations

Reviews

[Boyd · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think the previous reviewers are being a little hard on this book. David Burke actually *is* a good writer, and he has a sharp eye for the interesting anecdote, sidelight, and comment; but he has bitten off a great big chunk of subject matter for a very short book, and the strain is evident. The range of notable residents in the Isakon building is one of the things that makes the story so fascinating, but when you have this many significant figures in art, architecture, literature, and spycraft roosting in one place, you're simply not going to be able to do them justice in 225 lightly packed pages of text.

It's only fair to point out that the book is a volume in Boydell's series "History of British Intelligence," so naturally that's where the emphasis is going to be. Still, the book has a hurried and crowded feel. The cast of characters fairly whizzes by, and it's hard to get and keep everyone straight, even with the help of the Dramatis Personae in the front of the book. I also found the proliferation of acronyms--no doubt all in a day's work for intelligence specialists-quite dispiriting and a real hindrance to the book's flow.

I hope at some point someone will write a good (and longer) book on the Isakon focused more closely on its architectural and cultural dimensions rather than on the revolving carousel of spies, interesting though the latter is.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to read this book for some time, and when I got around to it I was a bit disappointed. I'm not sure what I expected but it wasn't this. There's not really any visible pattern to the narrative. Some of the information is very interesting, some of it goes into too much detail and becomes tedious. I would have preferred this book to have gone at the subject from another angle.

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intressant, men lite rörig och inte helt tydlig vem boken riktar sig mot

[Chrissy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating history of a London architectural masterpiece and its inhabitants, many famous and infamous.

[Susan · Rating 1 out of 5]

A tattle-tale account of spies and creative types who lived in a Bauhaus apartment building near Hampstead Heath in the 1950's. There really was not enough material or the author does not know how to tell a story. The designers of the building, not well enough illustrated, meant to make life simple and private by providing small flats with built-in furniture, on site laundry and parking and a club and restaurant accessible to the Tube and yet in the Park. Lawn Road Flats was a great improvement over the dingy sort of rooming houses for middle class professionals in London after WWII. It fell upon evil days in the late 1960's and within the last 5 or so years has been restored. Surely worth a detour!