The lawn road flatsl london
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 David Burke 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. The lawn road flatslake I hope at some point someone will write a good and longer book on the Isakon focused closely on its architectural and cultural dimensions rather than on the revolving carousel of spies interesting though the latter is David Burke Intressant men lite r rig och inte helt tydlig vem boken riktar sig mot David Burke 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 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 The Lawn Road Flats Spies Writers and Artists History of British Intelligence 3 DAVID BURKE is a historian of intelligence and international relations
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