John le Carré's London

Event information

Join us on a search for dead drops and safe houses, scalp-hunters and watchers – and keep an eye out for the mole...

We’ll be visiting places that helped to shape John le Carré himself and also starred in his most famous works. En route, we’ll see some of London’s real-life espionage landmarks. From the dusty back rooms of David Cornwell’s life as a spy to the headquarters he imagined for George Smiley and co, we’ll look at how a writer with an exacting eye for detail mined his own life and the failures of Britain’s secret services for verisimilitude.


Richard Hutt is the author of the annotated map, “John le Carré's London”, published by Herb Lester Associates. He has made radio programmes about wine, TV documentaries about cinema, books about being a man and maps about spies. He has spent many years building a convincing cover story in media regulation. The BBC’s “Tinker Tailor” adaptation was the first post-watershed TV he was allowed to watch. Growing up in 1970s Bloomsbury, not far from the film locations, he found the line between fiction and reality blurred in an intoxicating way – a mystery which deepened with questions about his own father’s shadowy past.