Agatha Christie at the Isokon

Christie's Arrival in Belsize Park

The presence of Agatha Christie among the Isokon Building's residents is one of those historical ironies that seem too good to be invented. The quintessentially English crime writer, whose imagination ran to country houses, village greens, and the drawing rooms of the upper middle class, found herself living in the most determinedly un-English building in London — a concrete modernist block designed by a Canadian architect on principles developed in Weimar Germany. The juxtaposition of Christie's world and the Isokon's world was absolute, and it is a tribute to both the writer and the building that the arrangement proved so productive.

Christie moved into Flat 22 at Lawn Road Flats in 1941, at the height of the London Blitz. Her second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, was serving with the Royal Air Force, and Christie needed a London base that was manageable for a single person while her husband was away. The Isokon offered exactly the kind of serviced minimum accommodation that made sense for wartime living: small enough to be easily maintained without domestic staff, centrally located enough to be convenient for the London work that Christie was undertaking during the war, and equipped with the communal facilities that replaced the conventional household arrangements impossible in wartime conditions.

The choice of the Isokon also reflected Christie's practical nature. Whatever her literary imagination might prefer in the way of setting, she was a woman of considerable personal efficiency who recognised a well-designed space when she saw one. The Isokon's organisation of the minimum flat — every surface purposeful, every fitting carefully chosen — was entirely compatible with her working habits, and the building's communal facilities reduced the domestic burden that would otherwise have fallen on her during Mallowan's absence.

Writing at Lawn Road

The years at Lawn Road were among the most productive of Christie's career. She completed several novels during her time at the Isokon, including some of the works that would become her most celebrated and enduring. The wartime context gave her writing a particular intensity; London during the Blitz was a city living with death in a way that gave the fictional murders of detective fiction a different resonance, and Christie's work of this period reflects, however obliquely, the shadow of real violence that hung over the city.

N or M?, published in 1941 during her time at Lawn Road, is one of the few Christie novels that engages directly with the war. Her husband-and-wife detective team Tommy and Tuppence Beresford are tasked with identifying Nazi fifth columnists operating in a seaside boarding house — a setting that manages simultaneously to evoke the cosy world of Christie's pre-war fiction and the genuine anxieties of wartime Britain. The novel is set partly in locations that recall the kind of English seaside town quite unlike Belsize Park, but its concerns are entirely of its moment.

Five Little Pigs, written during the Lawn Road years, is widely considered among Christie's finest works: a retrospective murder mystery in which Hercule Poirot investigates a case that occurred sixteen years earlier by interviewing the five people who were present when the original crime was committed. The novel's careful structure, its psychological depth, and the elegance of its solution suggest a writer at the height of her powers — powers that the peculiar circumstances of life in a modernist flat during the London Blitz had apparently not diminished.

The Isokon Community

Christie's relations with her neighbours at the Isokon are only partially documented, but the social life of the building during the wartime years was by all accounts remarkably rich. The concentration of distinguished minds in a small space naturally generated intense social interaction, and the Isobar restaurant and bar in the basement was the venue for conversations and encounters that would have been remarkable in any setting. Christie moved in a social world that overlapped significantly with the building's other residents: she knew, to varying degrees, many of the émigré artists and intellectuals who made the Isokon their London home.

The question of whether Christie was aware of the Soviet spy network that had connections to the Isokon through several of its residents — a network whose activities would only become fully public in later decades — is one that biographers have found irresistible. The idea that the creator of detective fiction lived in a building that housed real spies is almost too perfect as a biographical irony. Christie herself, as far as can be established, had no knowledge of or connection to the espionage activities, and her time at the Isokon appears to have been exactly what it seems: that of a working writer making the best of difficult wartime circumstances.

Her neighbours included, at various times, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer (both of whom had been at the Isokon before the war but were now in the United States), László Moholy-Nagy, various figures from the worlds of publishing, film, and journalism, and a shifting population of wartime Londoners for whom the Isokon's serviced accommodation offered a practical solution to the chaos of Blitz-era housing. The social world of the Isobar was genuinely cosmopolitan, mixing English residents with refugees from across Europe, and Christie moved within it with the quiet social competence that characterised her relations with the world at large.

Christie's London and the Geography of Crime

Agatha Christie's relationship with London was complex and has been somewhat underappreciated in the context of her work. The country houses and village settings of classic Christie are so dominant in the popular imagination that the urban dimensions of her fiction are easily overlooked, but in fact London plays a significant role in many of her novels and was the environment in which she spent a considerable proportion of her working life. Belsize Park was one of the London locations that she knew well from her own residence, and its particular character — the mixture of intellectual bohemianism and comfortable middle-class domesticity, the presence of distinguished foreigners and eccentric intellectuals, the sense of a neighbourhood with its own strong identity within the larger city — was perfectly suited to her observational gifts.

Hercule Poirot, Christie's most celebrated creation, was of course himself an exile in London — a Belgian detective who brought Continental ratiocination to bear on English crime. The Isokon Building, with its Continental design principles and its community of European refugees, was in a sense a perfect setting for a character of Poirot's disposition. Whether Christie consciously drew on her Lawn Road experience in imagining Poirot's London is impossible to say, but the connections are suggestive.

Christie left the Isokon Building after the war, when Max Mallowan returned from military service and the couple resumed their joint life and their archaeological expeditions. The flat at Lawn Road reverted to its role as one of thirty-six units in the building, and Christie moved on to the more permanent London base in Chelsea that she would occupy for the rest of her life. But the Lawn Road years had been important ones, and the building that had housed the queen of crime during the darkest period of the twentieth century had earned its place in literary history alongside its other remarkable claims on our attention.

The Christie Legacy

The association between Agatha Christie and the Isokon Building has become one of the most frequently cited facts about both. It appears in virtually every account of the building's history, and it features prominently in the Isokon Gallery's interpretation of the building for visitors. The combination of Christie's extraordinary celebrity — she remains the world's best-selling fiction writer after Shakespeare — with the building's architectural significance creates a story that is immediately gripping to audiences who might otherwise have limited interest in the technicalities of interwar modernism.

The flat itself — number 22, on the upper walkway of the building — has been pointed out to generations of Christie enthusiasts and architectural pilgrims. There is nothing to distinguish it from its neighbours, which is entirely appropriate: the Isokon's design deliberately minimised individual expression in favour of collective order, and the flat that Christie occupied looks exactly like the flat beside it. The story of what happened inside — the manuscripts typed, the plots constructed, the wartime anxieties sublimated into the perfect puzzles of detective fiction — must be reconstructed entirely from the literary record.

*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London’s most remarkable neighbourhoods.*