We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Lawn Road Flats, also known as the Isokon building, comprises 32 units of equal size in Lawn Road, Belsize Park, North London. It was, and remains, a remarkable building with an equally remarkable history.
The name, Isokon arose from the architect Wells Coates' use of isometric perspective in his drawings and, as the Lawn Road Flats were to be in ‘a form of modular units, “Isometric Unit Construction” soon became Isokon’. While this was not the first modernist building in Britain – that accolade should go to ‘New Ways’ in Northampton, a whitewashed, cement-rendered, two storey structure with a crested parapet, designed by the German architect, Peter Behrens in 1925 – the construction of the Isokon building was the first time reinforced concrete was used in British domestic architecture.
On the face of it, the Isokon building is a curious subject for an intelligence historian but the idea for this book was sparked by a paragraph in The Mitrokhin Archive, an account of the KGB, written by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin. There, the Austrian communist spy Arnold Deutsch, controller of ‘The Magnificent Five,’ the five Cambridge graduates who spied for the Soviet Union between 1934 and 1963, is found living in Lawn Road Flats, next door to the crime novelist Agatha Christie:
Early in 1934 Deutsch travelled to London under his real name, giving his profession as ‘university lecturer’ and using his academic credentials to mix in university circles. After living in temporary accommodation, he moved to a flat in Lawn Road, Hampstead, the heartland of London's radical intelligentsia. […]
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
