Sex, drugs and Soviet spy rings: welcome to Dolphin Square

Dolphin Square is changing. Those hulking, monolithic apartment blocks built on the banks of the Thames in Pimlico, rarely mentioned in headlines without the adjectives “notorious” or “infamous”, are undergoing a multimillion pound renovation aimed at rejuvenating them, and perhaps their reputation, as they approach their hundredth birthday in 2038. The timeframe for the modernisation gives some indication of the scale of the buildings: it is estimated that work on the 1,250 apartments will take eight years, only six years longer than it took to build them in the first place.

Perhaps the new work will return some lost vibrancy to the once-upmarket estate; despite the scale of the place (for over 60 years it held the largest number of residential units under a single roof of any building in Europe) it has, in recent years, become a quiet, slightly dilapidated oasis in the corporate blankness of Westminster. Its gardens are neat but dated, with chestnut trees lining a central path towards formal gardens of roses, and a tasteful if uninspired pond where a sculpture of three dolphins twists around a small fountain. Its blocks, each named after a great British admiral, stand facing each other like vast cliffs of brick. Inside, the public areas feel slick with aspic and formaldehyde, a remnant of a past age whose glamour has long faded, chipped and been papered over. A little shopping arcade houses a cafe selling cups of tea and sandwiches, a hairdresser’s doing last minute dos, and a newsagent’s stocking a history of the development written by disgraced Labour MP Simon Danczuk. 

Disgrace seems to haunt Dolphin Square. Perhaps it is the very unprepossessing quietness of the place that has led to its reputation as a den of establishment iniquity and vice. Disgrace follows on the failure of discretion, after all, and its location so close to the heart of the British establishment has long made it a favoured home for the pieds-à-terre and grace-and-favour apartments of the nation’s elite. If power corrupts, then Dolphin Square seems to have been corrupted absolutely, from Lord Sewel, secretly filmed in an apartment in 2015 allegedly snorting coke and partying with sex workers, to resident party girls Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, whose involvement in the Profumo Affair contributed to the Tory government’s defeat in the 1964 General Election. 

The estate’s most serious and disturbing link to crime, however, came with accusations that, throughout the 1970s and 80s, it had been home to an elite paedophile ring of high-ranking MPs and peers.