Chelsea

The spies who lived here

How I found James Bond’s precise address

By William Boyd

Wellington Square, Chelsea, London|© J Marshall - Tribaleye Images/Alamy

July 17, 2020

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Iam in London. In Chelsea to be precise, at the entrance to Wellington Square off the King’s Road, where I am being interviewed for the French radio station RTL – à distance sociale – about James Bond. The reason why we’re at Wellington Square is because this is where James Bond lived. Obviously, James Bond is a fictional character and didn’t actually live anywhere. However, it is strange how in the case of some fictional characters a kind of reality begins to take over their lives, as if they really did live and breathe, had an actual address and a mortgage.

I point out to the interviewer that, a few yards across the King’s Road from where we’re standing, almost directly opposite, is the entrance to Bywater Street. Believe it or not, I tell him, another famous fictional spy, John le Carré’s George Smiley, lived in Bywater Street. This extraordinary coincidence causes some excited consternation and we stop recording and cross the road. In Bywater Street, we start recording again. “George Smiley lived here? Amazing. What number?” the interviewer asks. Number 9, I say. You see what I mean.

I suppose the most famous fictional abode for a character is Sherlock Holmes’s 221b, Baker Street. James Bond’s address and George Smiley’s have yet to achieve the same legendary status, but give them time. When I came to write my James Bond continuation novel, Solo (2013), I set myself the task of re-reading all of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels in chronological order, pen in hand, making notes, with the idea that all the texture and detail in the new novel would be classic Bondiana, sourced in Fleming. One of the first things I noticed was the location of Bond’s flat. I found it odd that Fleming should have given Bond a Chelsea address. In the 1950s, when most of the Bond novels were written, certainly the best ones, Chelsea was not the salubrious area it has become. There were a few wealthy pockets of substantial houses – Cheyne Walk, Chelsea Square, Carlyle Square, Tite Street, the Embankment, Old Church Street and environs – but most of the streets were poor and lived in by poor people. It was almost a working-class district, full of bomb sites from the Blitz, seasoned with a few bohemian types. This was one of the reasons why, when the Swinging 60s arrived, the…