Conrad’s The Secret Agent cast a critical eye over London at the end of the nineteenth century when the capital was home to a series of revolutionary anarchist groups. They had come to police attention following royal pressure after the assassination of the Tsar of Russia. The Secret Agent, Verloc, in Conrad’s novel is a double agent,  blackmailed to commit an outrage which ends in family tragedy.  The death of Stevie, Verloc’s son in law,  is closely based on a real anarchist explosion near the Greenwich Observatory in 1894.

Successive waves of exiles from France, Germany and Russia had made a home in Fitzrovia and Soho, close to the British Museum where Marx and Lenin studied, yet in an area where foreigners ran the bookstores and shops. On this walk we will find the street housing Verloc’s pornographic bookshop and revisit the site of the Autonomie anarchist club, raided by police after the Greenwich bomb. We will also learn more about the actions of Chief Inspector Melville, who was the model for Chief Inspector Heat.