'Lexham Gardens' Safe House - Holy Grail of Location Finds!

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Back in 2022, we highlighted the Lexham Gardens safe house as one of the most sought after Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy locations. At first glance, it would seem like an easy location to find - it is in London and there are visible street signs. Unfortunately, the street signs are BBC props and despite us and others intensively covering the Lexham Gardens area we simply could not match the location to anything that was there.

I wondered, given the rather down at heel look of the area in the series, whether the properties had since been demolished but Chris thought that there would not have been any visible alterations because architecture that ornate is worth a fortune. And he was proved right.

We will get to the where in a bit but let's start with who found it and how they found it.

A few weeks back I received an email graded FLASH to London Station from John Rundle. A glance at John's credits show he worked as a Camera Grip for over 35 years on dozens of television productions and films including 28 Days Later and Millions. 

The above photo was taken on location in June 1988 at The Smugglers Inn, Osmington Mills, filming an episode of Rockcliffe's Folly for the BBC. Left to right: Alec Curtis, Director of Photography on the Elemack Spyder Dolly (standard BBC Film Dept Equipment as used by Jimmy Monks on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), John Rundle, Liam ? (Camera assistant on attachment).

John's father had been a keen amateur photographer and he inherited this love of photography from his dad. John originally studied engineering at technical college and it was the combination of his photography and engineering background that made him ideally suited to work as a Camera Grip.

John explained to me how he got started in the industry:

With regard to my work as a camera grip I didn’t start to get recorded on IMDb until 1988, although I did have screen credits from 1986.

Before then I was working for a company supplying vehicles for television series. This work involved meetings with production, design, stunt performers etc. It included sourcing and preparing vehicles, driving or transporting them to locations, assisting the actors to make them ‘comfortable’ with the driving, positioning and resetting the vehicles and assisting the camera department to enable various camera positions to be achieved. It may sound pretty straightforward until something goes wrong, such as a flat battery or some minor mechanical defect or occasionally the actor crashing the car!

I started this work in 1977 but only on a part time basis. I started full time in 1980 and worked on both the first and second series of 'Juliet Bravo', the first series of 'The Chinese Detective', the first and second series of 'Nanny' with Wendy Craig and many other big and small productions for both the BBC and commercial television companies. So I had plenty of time to look and learn as to the role of a Camera Grip.

I had a good friend who was a sound recordist/engineer who was working for a production company in Leeds and he managed to convince them that I could work as a grip on some of their projects. Not having been rumbled I carried on and eventually got to work on a Mersey Television production called 'What Now'. On the back of this I knocked on the door at the BBC Television Film Studios in Ealing. The rest, as they say, is history!

Although John is a huge fan of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, he did not work on the series. However, on one of his Holiday Relief Attachments at Television Film Studios Ealing, he had three days work on A Perfect Spy as a Second Grip on crane shots and generally assisted the Grip, Adrian McCarthy, on location in and around the terraced house in Dawlish.

Incidentally, John has been able to identify two of the Camera Grips from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. In the photo below (which was taken during filming in Scotland) on the right squatting down is Chief Grip Jimmy Monks (who John remembers from Juliet Bravo) and the Grip standing on the board is John Dowden, affectionately known to his friends and colleagues as 'The Womble'. 

John retired about five years ago and has used his filming knowledge to 'unpick' some scenes from the series, working out the possible interior and exterior locations. And he has certainly found some treasure to share with us. We will cover John's other finds in future posts but for now we are just going to focus on the Lexham Gardens location and how he found it, which is a pretty interesting story in itself.

The location had been dressed as Lexham Gardens so there were no obvious clues to the actual location in the footage shot on the street and by the house. Based on his experience, John guessed that they would probably have filmed the scenes of Guillam tailing Smiley in the vicinity of the house. John hoped that if he could pin down any of the street scenes he might be able to work out the location of the safe house from there. 

In the scene below (in episode 6 at 33.02), we can see Smiley walking towards the camera with a Boots Dispensing Chemists sign in the background. 

Fortunately, John still had a copy of Kelly’s Post Office London Directory, 1981, and was able to look up the locations of Boots branches in London around that time. He checked them all and matched one to a location on Earls Court Road.  He was then able to conclude that Smiley had walked down Hogarth Street into Hogarth Place. You can see a photo John took below showing how the street looks today. (If you compare the two images you will notice another example of how Tony Pierce-Roberts' use of a long focal length lens foreshortens Earls Court Road in the background, making it appear much closer than it actually is.)

In the next shot (at 33.29), we see Prideaux following precisely in Smiley's footsteps. He is keeping a safe distance and crossing Earls Court Road to walk down Hogarth Street. You will notice the colours of a branch of Lloyds bank on the left and today, there is still signage on the windows to indicate the branch has now closed. 

From here John undertook a search of the surrounding residential area using Google Earth and he found the safe house just a short walk from where the above scenes were filmed.

As it is a residential house we are not going to publish the full address but on the corner of Redcliffe Square and Westgate Terrace, looking just as it did in the series, you can find the 'Lexham Gardens' safe house. The comparison shot below shows the architecture is unchanged. 

When Smiley looks down at the street to see if Toby has brought a babysitter (also in episode 6 at 19.17), we can match the exterior of the house on the other side of the road.

Assuming the interior scenes were filmed in the house (and based on what we know about the rest of the production it is very likely that they were) we can make a guess about which room filming took place in. The room in question has two windows and looking at it from the outside, there would be a corridor to the left of the room. 

We have highlighted a possible filming location on the image below. 

We are not certain though because there is a door at the far end of the corridor (see below right) and unless that leads to a small cupboard, our guesswork may not be accurate. 

Our assumptions are complicated further by the fact that there has been a first floor extension over the main entrance. (You can see the brickwork is a different colour and the cornice over the window openings does not match the original features.) Therefore, it is entirely possible filming took place on the first floor and the extension is now covering the location.

Additionally, John and Chris think that the shot of Smiley's point of view from the window was probably filmed from one of the rooms further back along Westgate Terrace, which means this is another possible location for the interior scenes. We may never know for sure which room filming took place in.

In terms of where the filming location is relative to the real Lexham Gardens, you can see on the map below it is just a 15 minute walk north west of Earls Court tube station. 

Now that the location has been identified, I found myself reflecting on the importance of the scenes filmed here. What takes place in the safe house is revelatory in terms of the plot - it is where the viewer finds out ‘what’s been going on'. All of Smiley’s careful research is articulated in an easily digestible way for Toby and the audience. Guinness is sublime, although his performance is virtually a monologue. It feels like this is a release for Smiley after all of his diligent detective work. At times it seems as though he is showing off a bit as he toys with Toby.

Bernard Hepton is at his absolute best here. His discomfort with what he is hearing is palpable and conveyed in every glance. When Smiley points out that Toby has been set up as the fall guy in this operation, we really sense his rising agitation and panic. 

Although uncovering the identity of Gerald the mole is the big reveal in Tinker Tailor, I would argue it is Smiley’s presentation here of his thesis about Karla's clever knot that represents the intellectual climax of the series. 

Thanks to John, we have now identified a major previously unknown London location but that is far from everything he has shared with us. In subsequent articles, based on his research, we will be exploring other locations including a trip to Oxford and 'The Starlight Laundry'.

I'm very grateful to John, Chris and all our contributors for enriching this website with their research. If you have any information you think would be of interest to fans of these series feel free to drop me a line at guinnessissmiley@icloud.com 

Photos in this article of the locations as they appear today are courtesy of John Rundle.