Shhhhhh...
You may not know this, but August 9th sees the anniversary of the dropping of ‘Fat Man’. Although never eulogised in song like its cousin ‘Little Boy’, the bomb that hit Nagasaki at about 7:50 in the morning on August 9th has had arguably the greatest influence: ending the war with Japan at a stroke and kick-starting 50 years of Cold-War between East and West.
As the capital of the UK, London became a centre of espionage activity in the post-war years, witnessing spies, defection and assassination on its streets. What better than taking the weekend anniversary of the spiritual start of the Cold War to take a stroll and look over its effects on the London skyline? We’ll meet you at the Marquess of Anglesey. We’ll be the one with the red tie who answers to the codename ‘OTTO’.
Our tour starts off in the Strand at the Courtauld Institute of Art, which seems a fairly innocuous place to kick off a visit to the Capital’s underground world. However, it was here where one of the famous ‘Cambridge Five’ Anthony Blunt spent his post-war years, before being unmasked as a KGB agent in 1963. A close cousin of the monarch and the keeper of her private art collection, Blunt’s betrayal was a huge blow to the establishment. It was covered up until the 1980’s when Thatcher’s government broke the scandal and stripped the spy of his knighthood.
A short walk towards the river and you’ll come across Waterloo Bridge. It was here, by the bus-stop that the KGB assassinated Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in 1978. In what almost seems like something from a James Bond film, Markov was jabbed in the thigh by a passer-by’s umbrella, injecting a tiny metal ball containing the lethal poison ricin. Markov died in hospital four days later.
Near the south-side of the bridge and you’ll find Century House. Now a block of luxury flats, this was the cold war home of MI 6, Britain’s foreign intelligence office. MI 6 didn’t have a happy time during the early post-war years, finding itself caught up in three scandals that rocked the agency, and culminating in the defection of three of the Cambridge five. They moved from these fairly ordinary looking buildings to their modern fortress in Vauxhall in 1996.
Now’s probably a good time to grab a drink, and a quick walk around the corner should lead you to super-swish boozer The Horse. We hear the vodka martini is particularly excellent, if you know what we mean.
Walking north, you’ll find Westminster Bridge and the famous Houses of Parliament. According to declassified Soviet files command and control structures were primary targets for a nuclear strike against the west, and chances are Westminster would have been ground-zero had the balloon gone up.
In the 1950’s it was estimated by British planners that an attack on London would devastate a 28 mile radius of the city and kill at least 42,000 in the first few seconds. Luckily the cabinet would have survived – whisked away to live in a gigantic nuclear bunker in Wiltshire alongside 6000 civil servants and audio typists.
A short walk through St James Park is Curzon Street, MI 5’s former home. Although the real business was probably done from park benches and musty terrace houses, it was from here that Britain’s spy catchers masterminded the effort to keep Communism at bay, keeping files on everyone from Yuri Andropov to Jack Straw.
It’s quite ironic when you think about it: just a short walk away, St James Park is rumoured to have been a smorgasbord of KGB activity, with several dead letter boxes and rendezvous points scattered around its grounds. We dare you have a look and see if you can find some
Walking through Mayfair to Belgravia and you’ll find Brompton Road’s abandoned tube station. It may not look like much, but this site formed part of the last-line of defence in Britain’s Cold War strategy. Owned by the MOD since the late forties, its true purpose remains a secret, although it is thought to have been used to coordinate London’s air defences until at least the mid 1950’s. Access down to the site is impossible, and trying to break in will probably end in a face-to-face meeting with a couple of MPs, but the top level can still be seen from the road.
This seems like a poignant place to end our tour, for despite the millions spent on shelters like this one, chances are the occupants would have suffocated as the air was sucked out of their vents by a nuclear fire ball. An event which ultimately never happened.
The Bunch of Grapes is nearby, and we suggest that you head there for a good debriefing session and a couple martinis, safe in the knowledge that if the big-one did come, from this distance you’d only know about it for, oh, 0.5 seconds.
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