PP/16/4 - Tenants of Lawn Road Flats, 1934-1968

PP/16/4

File

Tenants of Lawn Road Flats, 1934-1968

1934-1968

38 sub files; 11 boxes Mixed

Lawn Road Flats -- Tenants

Correspondence and legal documents relating to the tenants of Lawn Road Flats. Includes papers concerning the administration of individual flats and individual tenancy agreements.

Early residents included refugees from Hitler’s Germany: Walter Gropius (architect and founder of the Bauhaus) and his colleagues Marcel Breuer and László Moholy-Nagy; and the Austrian architect Egon Riss. The Isokon building attracted creative men and women like the sculptors Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, Agatha Christie (crime writer); and Nicholas Monsarrat (novelist); Raymond Postgate (writer and founder of the ‘Good Food Guide’). It is also known to have housed prominent Soviet agents working against Britain in the 1930s and ’40 among them Arnold Deutsch, the controller of the ‘Cambridge Five’; the Kuczynski family who helped recruit Klaus Fuchs to disclose the atomic bomb secrets to Stalin, Edith Tudor-Hart (photographer and Soviet spy), and Charles Brasch (poet and Bletchley Park intelligence officer).