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"Watching the Watchers" – Where does MI5 get its cars serviced?
That question sounds like the start to one of those corny jokes you hear just before closing time in the pub on a Friday night.
But wait a minute. Perhaps an initial serious attempt at answering the question would be to suggest a depot on an industrial estate, close to the famous disused Battersea Power Station in South West London. A substantial unmarked building at the end of Ponton Road (map below), next to the Christie's Fine Art Auctioneers warehouse, turns out to be the Government Car and Despatch Agency (GCDA).
GCDA Ponton Road
[ 51 28 49N, 00 08 05W ] |
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However, to quote a famous TV advertisement, "it does exactly what it says on the tin". The high security facility supplies vehicles to Cabinet Ministers and other UK Government and Ministry of Defence VIPs. It also provides secure official document handling across the capital.
Although the building is unmarked - apart from the coy "46 Ponton Road" sign above the main reception - it is hardly completely hidden from the public. The GCDA has its own website - www.gcda.gov.uk - detailing all of their services.
Of course, the possibility that MI5 also use the GCDA depot as a "front" cannot be completely ruled out!
To add to all the intrigue, in an amazing breach of security in late September 2007, a specially adapted BMW 7 Series car ordered for former Prime Minister Tony Blair – with bullet-proof windows and reinforced doors – was delivered direct from Germany in a container, to the Metropolitan Police Garages (right and below) immediately next door to GCDA.
Upon opening the consignment, bemused officers from the Met Police's Counter-Terrorism Command were greeted by asylum seekers who had climbed inside!
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Site of old MI5 Garages
Barnard Road, Clapham
[ 51 27 42N, 00 10 01W ] |
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MI5 operatives working in Section 4 within "A" (Technical) Branch - nicknamed "The Watchers" - are tasked with direct covert observation of "targets" using specially equipped vehicles. The MI5 "A4" agents need a base where their tools of the trade - the Watchers vehicles - are "serviced". Of course the term "serviced" covers many more activities than normally supplied by those helpful chaps down your average Kwik Fit depot!
Many such Watchers depots have been uncovered over the decades. Famously, some A4 Garages tucked away down Barnard Road near Clapham Junction (map below) were abandoned by MI5 in the 1970s when it was discovered that Russian spies had been photographing them. It was, after all, the height of the Cold War.
They have since been demolished and some new houses have been built on the site, next to the goods entrance to Clapham's branch of Marks and Spencer.
More recently, there has been a lively discussion on Google Groups regarding a very strange car servicing depot somewhere else in London. Puzzled contributors to the Internet message boards have reported suspicious "comings and goings" and an extraordinarily high level of security, for what everyone had assumed was a place where members of the public were getting their oil changed and exhausts renewed.
I decided to investigate for Eye Spy Magazine.
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In the late 1970s, following the demise of the Barnard Road Garages, it seems MI5 decided on a replacement location that nobody could really describe as "secret". The chosen location was on a busy South West London suburban high street with hundreds of buses and thousands of cars passing every day. It is just across the road from a popular common where people walk their dogs and next to a huge supermarket and a large popular pub. It is directly opposite both a petrol station and the area's main health clinic and is just around the corner from two nurseries where young mums drop off their little ones before going to work.
In other words, the depot could hardly be MORE public! Perhaps the reasoning was that being so public and "ordinary", the location would not attract suspicion and it would "blend into the background" of everyday life! So where is it?
Take a look at the large building on Streatham High Road (map and first photo below), just south of Streatham Common, in the space bounded by the junctions of Kempshott Road and Penistone Road (second photo below).
Streatham High Road is one of the busiest in London and is reputed to be the longest continuous high street in Western Europe. It forms part of the A23 trunk route - the London to Brighton road. The area around the northern end of Streatham High Road was previously infamous for a 1980s scandal that rocked the "Establishment" and inspired the hit film comedy Personal Services. It was the location of "Madam Sin" Cynthia Payne's brothel, where she supplied exotic entertainment for Members of Parliament, High Court judges, senior policemen and journalists - all in exchange for a fist full of Luncheon Vouchers.
MI5 Garages Streatham
[ 51 25 06N, 00 07 41W ] |
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Those familiar red London Transport buses, declaring "Streatham Garage" on their destination boards, pass along the road all day long. But disappointingly, they turn into the major bus depot situated on the north side of the Common!
The Streatham MI5 vehicle depot really is quite ordinary looking - even down to the peeling cream-coloured masonry paint - but note the huge extraction chimney to remove fumes. The game is really given away by the substantial razor wire fencing, the countless CCTV cameras and also the security kiosk with barrier - around the corner on Kempshott Road - resembling those found at Army garrisons and RAF & USAF bases.
Take a wander around the depot and you will notice many roller-shutter doors, normally firmly closed. But now and again they are temporarily opened to reveal a teasing glimpse of all the paraphernalia normally associated with car servicing, such as hydraulic ramps. The depot's car compound, to the front and in full public view on the Streatham High Road side, is packed with vehicles with funny plastic markers on the roofs showing numbers - just like the table reservation signs you see in restaurants. Could these be indicating job numbers?
It may well be that rusty old "bog standard" Ford Escorts enter the depot, only to be released back onto the streets a few days later having engines modified in order to reach 150 mph and their brakes and suspensions up-rated to cope with that "little extra" under the bonnet!
There are no markings around the site to identify its true purpose to curious members of the public - except for a simple address plate reading "512 - 522 Streatham High Road", which also directs official visitors and suppliers' delivery drivers to the main security gate on Kempshott Road.
Naturally, I plugged this address into the various research tools I use on my "Secret Bases" website - www.secret-bases.co.uk. Well, what do you know? There is a suspicious "hole" in the Royal Mail address database and that particular sequence of numbers is missing! The Royal Mail data manages to pick-up the sequence again on the south side of Penistone Road at 524 Streatham High Road, which used to be the Streatham Mazda car salesroom (third photo below). Mazda ceased trading from this site in April 2006.
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 "The Stig" drives past the MI5 Garages on Streatham High Road in a Caterham Seven
for BBC Top Gear's London to Knockhill, Scotland Challenge in July 2006
COPYRIGHT © BBC
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Eagle-eyed viewers of the BBC's Top Gear motoring programme in July 2006 would have spotted the Streatham MI5 Garages making a surprise guest appearance (above). In one of the show's regular challenges, presenters Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May attempted to construct a Caterham Seven kit car in a workshop bay at Knockhill Racing Circuit near Dunfermline, Scotland. Meanwhile, the enigmatic racing driver and resident car tester "The Stig" drove a ready-built production vehicle from the Caterham factory showroom in Surrey up to Knockhill in the hope of arriving before the presenters could finish their assembly work.
In a brief scene at the start of his journey, "The Stig" was shown driving along Streatham High Road right past the MI5 Garages! But did he pop in for a little performance tweak? If he did, it was all in vain because he was stopped by speed cops just a mile from the Knockhill Race Track and so lost the challenge. Little did he know that just a few hundred yards away was another Secret Base hidden in a Scottish forest clearing! To find out what it is, be sure to visit Part 2 of my main Secret Bases website!
Rather than a top secret MI5 agents' operations base (details of which publishers are obviously requested not to disclose, under the UK MoD DA-Notice system), the Streatham depot is simply a facilities workshop where Security Service vehicles are serviced.
It may even be used to "lift" target vehicles, say from public car parks, fit them with tracker and eavesdropping equipment, then drop them back (suitably "altered") where they were found! It is of course imperative that the A4 engineers make sure the driver's seat and rear view & door mirrors are in exactly the same positions as before!
It will come as little surprise that Duncan Campbell - one of the leading independent experts on "Secret Bases" in the world - has written about the Streatham depot on several occasions over the last 25 years. A decade ago, he was even interviewed standing outside the main gate, in a TV programme hosted by Chris Tarrant - now more famous for teasing and taunting contestants on the UK version of "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?"
Mr. Campbell tells me that the Streatham depot may even have been used to kit out the vehicles required by MI6 handlers to hurriedly remove their long serving KGB double agent Oleg Gordievsky from Russia over the border into Finland in 1985, hidden in the boot of a car.
The Streatham garages and many other past and present facilities used by both MI5 and MI6 have been documented by Richard Bennett, the author, broadcaster and photo journalist who maintains his fascinating AFI Research (American and Foreign Intelligence) ISDB - International Security Database.
Therefore all these locations are already widely in the public domain - it's impossible to "force the genie back into the bottle", as the saying goes!
It was ironic that for once, I hadn't needed my usual "Secret Base" research tools - those trusty Getmapping aerial photos. MI5 had used a form of stealth technology that comes very cheap. They had been brave and bold and placed a "Secret Base" where you'd least expect it to be - "in your face" and "right under your nose"!
Major News Update!
In May 2007, reports started to come in that the
Streatham MI5 Garages had been completely abandoned
and the operations had moved elsewhere!
In September 2007, I exclusively revealed
who had acquired the site. So who are they?
What are their plans? Read on!
| As seen in "Secret Britain" – Eye Spy Magazine 49, July / August 2007 |
In May 2007, MI5 launched a major recruitment drive with an advertisement campaign using posters on London buses and tube trains, as detailed in a news story in the Financial Times.
The MI5 Careers website featured a job advert for Vehicle Body Repair Technicians based at a brand new top secret state-of-the-art garage facility somewhere in "West London" – also thought to be the site of MI5's new much talked about "out of town" backup for Thames House.
The advert was later changed to one for the more general Vehicle Technicians.
I then discovered that back in March 2006, Lambeth Council received a major planning application – reference number "06/00918/PREAP" – for the demolition of the whole Streatham MI5 Garage site.
The proposals included redevelopment of the site into a new five storey building comprising retail and commercial units at ground level, with up to 90 private residential units on the upper levels.
Curiously (by sheer coincidence of course!), just a few days after I published that link to the planning application, Lambeth Council pulled the document from their website for "reasons of confidentiality". Just as well I had a screen shot in my archive then!
However, there are four other historical planning applications, relating to the Streatham MI5 Garages dating back to 1993, still available to view on Lambeth Council's website! By late 2006, the commercial property consultants Drivers Jonas had been instructed by the MoD to invite offers for such a development and applications were closed on 19th January 2007.
In May 2007, the development advertisement on the Drivers Jonas website (below) was showing "Under Offer", but by September 2007, the document had been removed. This is because the site had been sold to Access Self Storage for development into new premises, like the one pictured below left. In December 2007, a new planning application by Access – reference number "07/04998/FUL" – was registered with Lambeth Council.
The property acquisition manager at Access informed me that the new Streatham centre was due to open "by the end of 2008". What better location to store your belongings than at a former top security MI5 "Secret Base"?
However, the proposals faced considerable opposition by local residents and the application was subsequently refused [report, PDF] by Lambeth Council in March 2008.
Just like the old 1970s Barnard Road location, the same has now happened with the Streatham garages. The story has gone full circle. The site has long since been vacated.
According to their official website, MI5's Watchers have moved to "somewhere in West London" ... not so "in your face" and "under your nose".
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 Drivers Jonas development advertisement
for the old MI5 Streatham Garages in May 2007
COPYRIGHT © Drivers Jonas
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All the locations featured in this article at high resolution courtesy of Google Maps!
IMPORTANT NOTE
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Out of courtesy, this article was forwarded to the UK Government's Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisory (D-Notice) Committee in Whitehall, London for scrutiny, prior to publication.
As all the information presented had previously been in the public domain for some considerable time, no objections were raised and no edits were requested.
As Rear Admiral Nick Wilkinson (former D-Notice Committee Secretary) had put it, in response to all the Media Hysteria surrounding the original launch of www.secret-bases.co.uk:-
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You are republishing open source material already widely in the public domain and not therefore increasing the danger to sensitive sites. These sites should already not only be aware of what is public, but also have taken security measures accordingly.
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Rear Admiral Nick Wilkinson
Secretary (1999-2004): Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisory (D-Notice) Committee
(September 2004) |
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