Agatha Christie at Isokon: the Modernist War Years

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THIS EVENT IS PART OF THE AGATHA CHRISTIE FESTIVAL

Leyla Daybelge and Magnus Englund

Between 1941 and 1947 Agatha Christie lived in the Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead, Britain’s first Modernist apartment block. Advertised during the Blitz, as the “safest building in London”, it was here, living in a tiny, 25-square-metre Minimum Apartment, that Christie entered one of the most prolific periods of her career. She penned the stage play, which would eventually become The Mousetrap, and Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case, the story in which she killed off her eponymous hero.

Christie’s fellow residents in the building, which later became known as the Isokon Flats, included left-wing artists, writers, archaeologists and even a network of Soviet spies.

Leyla Daybelge and Magnus Englund are Trustees of The Isokon Gallery and co-authors of Isokon and the Bauhaus in Britain, Batsford 2019, and Walter Gropius, an Illustrated Biography, Phaidon, 2023. Leyla Daybelge is an author and broadcaster, who worked for ITN, BBC Radio Four and Sky News. Magnus Englund is an author of design and architecture books and co-founder of the interior design retailer Skandium.