January 2009 Archives

At the north west corner of Portman Square, where it meets the southern end of Gloucester Place are three 18th Century town houses, which have been converted into a luxurious private members club.

The Home House Club (pronounced "hume", after the Scottish / Berwickshire aristocratic clan, to whom at least one British Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home was a related) occupies Numbers 21, 20 and 19 Portman Square. The entrance to Number 21 is on the western, Gloucester Place side of the block, and Numbers 20 and 19 are on the main Portman Square façade.

This real life club, may have influenced the fragment of cyberpunk literary author William Gibson's next novel, mentioning as it does the character of Inchmale, who appeared in Spook Country

See some discussion on the official William Gibson board discussion forum
Inchmale's club in Portman Square, which speculates on a fragment of text (which may, or may not actually end up in a novel) released by the author on his blog on 1st January 2009.

CABINET (HAPPY NEW YEAR) posted 12:09 AM

Inchmale's club, in Portman Square, was called Cabinet. It was a peculiarly narrow place, apparently occupying half of the vertical volume of a townhouse whose expensively forgettable façade reminded her of a sleeping face.

[...]

Apart from a futuristic architect designed House bar at Number 21,

the interior decoration evokes 18th Century aristocratic opulence, including

Anthony Blunt Bedroom

Named after a former resident of House No 20 who had an apartment here after the Second World War during his tenure as Master of the Queen's Art Collection.

[...]

This blurb conveniently forgets to mention Anthony Blunt's espionage career as a KGB spook, linked to the notorious Philby, Maclean and Burgess spy scandals, which rocked the British intelligence services in the 1950s and 1960s, and which was covered up by the establishment for many years, and which led to the stripping of his knighthood, when it was eventually made public. The treachery of the Cambridge Five spy ring has been hugely influential on British spy fiction, drama, tv and films.

Latitude: N51:30:59 (51.516433)
Longitude: W0:09:24 (-0.156541)

More images of 21, 20, 19 Portman Square:

London has lots of secret underground tunnels, dating from Victorian times, and especially from the World Wat 2 and Cold War eras.

One of the main secret telecommunications and secret (relatively) bomb proof complexes is in the Kingsway area around Holborn.

MI6's secret tunnels - A deep, dark secret

Nov 24th 2008
From Economist.com

Snooker, piranhas and a hotline to Moscow

[...]

That might be why I have never noticed anything unusual about 39 Furnival Street. A brick building in a row of offices, its black double-doors are unmarked and unremarkable. But if you stop for a moment and look up, you might reconsider that judgment. Above the entrance is an industrial-size cast-iron pulley--odd in a street of legal firms. Above that, curiouser still: a wide, gaping air vent of the sort that you might see at the top of a mine-shaft.

What lies inside was once subject to the Official Secrets Act. But now this mysterious property is up for sale, and so I find myself with a few other journalists on the other side of the doors, signing consent forms and handing in my mobile phone (whose signal had mysteriously vanished as soon as I crossed the threshold). A lift takes us down 100 feet, deeper than the London Underground, which we can hear rumbling above us. A set of atom-bomb-proof doors are swung open and we step out into the secret of Furnival Street: the Kingsway tunnels, a miniature city beneath a city.

Dug in 1940 as London was blitzed by German bombers, the tunnels were designed as a air-raid shelter for up to 8,000 people, and as a possible last-ditch base for the government in the event of an invasion. They were never used as a shelter; instead, towards the end of the war they were taken over by the "Inter Services Research Bureau", a shady outfit that was in fact a front for the research and development arm of MI6 (perhaps better known as Q branch in the James Bond novels).

After the war, the tunnels were passed to the Post Office and then to British Telecom, which hopes to sell the warren for £5m now that it is surplus to requirements.

[...]

The tunnels--a mile of them in total, comprising two main drags and four smaller offshoots--have homely, superterranean-sounding names: South Street, Second Avenue and Tea Bar Alley. The illusion is only broken when you see behind the wood panelling the iron support structure, embossed with the initials of the London Passenger Transport Board, from whom parts of Tube tunnel were borrowed to build the complex.

The tunnels were still in secret use long after the Battle of Britain had given way to the Cold War. Deep under my bicycle route, technicians maintained the "hotline" between Eisenhower and Khrushchev, as well as a basic domestic network for Britain that would keep the country connected in the event of a major strike.

[...]

I spot an old circuit diagram on the wall, mapping out each of Britain's national newspapers. Were they being bugged back then? Probably. The question on my mind as we make our way back to the surface is: in which tunnel are the eavesdroppers hiding now?

Latitude: N51:31:02 (51.517191)
Longitude: W0:06:37 (-0.110373)

39 Furnival Street entrance to the Kingsway tunnels complex

Some more details can be found on Malcolm Bay's Kingsway Telephone Exchange website., including this diagram from Peter Laurie's 1979 book Beneath the city streets: A private enquiry into government preparations for national emergency

Kingsway Telephone Exchange diagram (click for a larger image). The Furnival Street Exit is marked as number 16 on the diagram, and the Prudential Building is number 7.

More photos: