These London landmarks play a starring role in Hollywood’s biggest spy movies

London has been a favorite operational theater for cinematic espionage for nearly a century.  The capers began with Alfred Hitchcock, who established the modern spy thriller with The 39 Steps in 1935, using King’s Cross Station. On May 23, this tradition continues when filmgoers can catch Tom Cruise as super spy Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, with the city serving as the plot’s chessboard. It’s no surprise that Mission: Impossible’s eighth installment is filmed here. Britain’s capital seems purpose-built for spy craft—its ganglia of streets make perfect escape routes while concealing secrets, and its moody climate provides the ideal atmospheric cover for clandestine activities. 

Dubliner Alan Carroll publishes YouTube video guides to Bond film locales around the globe, but London is a favorite destination. “With its history, iconic architecture, and monuments to past achievements, the city is the quintessential backdrop for espionage movies from Bond to Mission: Impossible,” he says. As 007 actor Daniel Craig observed about the London featured in 2012’s Skyfall, “They made it very beautiful and very dark and sinister at times.” 

With Hunt on the hunt once more, the British capital remains a set jetters’ paradise for tailing fictional spies. Consider this mission, if you choose to accept it. A field operative’s dossier to London’s clandestine locations, helping you navigate the places where Hollywood fantasy and real-world spy craft converge. 

(Related: The essential guide to visiting London.)

Reckonings and rouges

In March 2024, alert Londoners spotted Tom Cruise sprinting down streets, filming Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, which includes a scene on iconic Trafalgar Square. Designed by John Nash and inaugurated in 1844, the square is one of the city’s most recognized landmarks and commemorates Britain’s naval victory at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Frequently a site of public protests, the plaza features Nelson’s Column, four iconic bronze lions, and hundreds of pigeons — their acidic droppings have resulted in cleaning bills worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. Feeding them has been illegal since the early 2000s. The square remains a vibrant, if pigeon-packed space, alive with the buzz of city life and the flutter of wings overhead.

Mission: Impossible’s fifth installment, Rogue Nation (2015), has Ethan’s IMF team’s clandestine gathering unfold on an upper floor of the Victorian Farmiloe Building (34-36 St John Street) in Clerkenwell. The 1868 edifice, made of Portland Stone and Suffolk brick, served as their warehouse headquarters. The structure is a familiar filming location, doubling as Gotham City Police Station in the Dark Knight, part of the Batman trilogy, as well as several other notable productions. While primarily used as an events space, film fans can still admire its distinctive exterior from the street. 

Fallout (2018) features Ethan Hunt entering St. Paul’s Cathedral during a funeral service before racing up the Dean’s Staircase to the Whispering Gallery. Then, he climbs onto the cathedral’s actual roof—with Tom Cruise performing the stunt himself—though wearing a safety harness that was digitally removed. Sir Christopher Wren’s English Baroque masterpiece, completed in 1710 following the Great Fire of London, sits on Ludgate Hill, which is the highest point in London. It became a symbol of British resolve during the WWII Blitz. Visitors can pay £15-to-£26 (U.S. $19-$34) adult entry fee to explore or worship here for free. It remains an active church with daily services. 

(Related: A family city guide to visiting London.)

The brand called Bond

Before Cruise, it was suave and Scottish Sean Connery who first branded London as a glamorous hotbed of operatives, double-agents, and espionage in James Bond’s debut in Dr. No (1962). The opening scene highlighted Les Ambassadeurs Club (5 Hamilton Place) in Mayfair. The 1807 Venetian Renaissance-style townhouse, then and still, a members-only casino, is where Bond plays a round of chemin de fer with beguiling Sylvia Trench, who asks the good-looking stranger his name.  “Bond, James Bond,” was the legendary reply.

Whitehall, the seat of British power, is a favorite Bond haunt. Carroll ticks off many landmarks featured in the iconic spy movies, including Westminster Bridge, Big Ben, the Cenotaph, and Churchill’s World War II bunker. Another one is The National Gallery, where Bond and a young Q first meet in Skyfall. In Room 34, they sit before J.W. Turner’s “The Fighting Temeraire,” discussing the painting’s once-mighty warship being tugboat-ed to destruction. The Gallery offers free entry to its famed collections, and it is open daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and on Fridays until 9 p.m.

Perhaps the world’s most recognizable real spy building, the headquarters of British foreign intelligence, MI6, at Vauxhall Cross (85 Albert Embankment), sits on the southside of the Thames. The postmodern fortress, completed in April 1994 and opened by Queen Elizabeth II that July, is featured prominently in five Bond films, including GoldenEye (1995), The World Is Not Enough (1999), and Die Another Day (2002). The best views are from Vauxhall Bridge, where the damp river air carries the hum of London life. 

Not far downriver, the Victorian-era Hammersmith Bridge creates a picturesque backdrop in No Time to Die(2021) during Bond’s London return. In 1887, Sir Joseph Bazalgette designed the bridge, which is one of the world’s oldest mechanical suspension bridges made of wrought and cast iron. After extensive restoration, Hammersmith Bridge reopened to pedestrians, bicyclists, and e-scooters last month [April 2025]. 

(Related: 11 things to do in London.)

Bourne Ultimatum, Slow Horses, and Black Doves

Of course, Hunt and Bond aren’t the only spies racing through London. Grand, bustling Waterloo Station with its commuter footfalls and crisp platform announcements became a thrilling espionage battleground in The Bourne Ultimatum (2007). The tense sequence where Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) guides a journalist through crowds while evading CIA operatives, highlighting the station’s labyrinthine interior. 

For streaming fans, the unassuming red-brick building at 126 Aldersgate Street represents shabby Slough House in Apple TV+’s Slow Horses. The headquarters for Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) and his misfit agents sits near the Barbican Estate, a major example of 1970s Brutalist architecture and filled with apartments and a performing arts center. The show’s fictional MI5 headquarters is placed in Regent’s Park, the well-known 410-acre greenspace in inner London. The real MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, is at Thames House (12 Millbank), near Lambeth Bridge. 

Netflix’s thriller Black Doves features an elegant six-bedroom house located at 7 Tudor Road in South London as Helen’s (Keira Knightley) home near 389-acre Crystal Palace Park. It’s named after a massive all-glass exhibition hall built in 1851 for a World’s Fair and was destroyed by a fire in 1936. The outdoor collection of 33 concrete dinosaurs survived. Considered inaccurate today, the 1850s reconstructions were one of the first attempts to imagine the giant reptiles. Located at one of London’s highest points, the park offers spectacular views. 

(Related: How to experience London like Bridget Jones.)

Dining and staying undercover

London offers several hotels with genuine espionage connections. Raffles’ The OWO (57 Whitehall) occupies the former Old War Office where famed spy TE Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) once labored. The 120-room property now houses a basement speakeasy called Spy Bar, alluding to the operations organized inside. 

James Bond creator and author Ian Fleming patronized The Dorchester (53 Park Lane). The hotel recently opened its Vesper Bar, named after the spy’s favorite cocktail, a Vesper Martini.

To dine covertly, visit Rules (35 Maiden Lane), London’s oldest restaurant, established in 1798, was featured prominently in Spectre (2015), where M, Q, and Moneypenny discuss Agent 007. The traditional menu specializes in game from Rule’s country estate. “You can even request M’s table,” Carroll says. 

In No Time to Die, Bond and M meet outside the Rutland Arms (15 Lower Mall), a quintessential British pub in Hammersmith. The American Bar at The Stafford Hotel (16-18 St James’s Place) buzzed with intelligence activity during World War II. Australian Nancy Wake—an agent code-named “The White Mouse” and one of the Gestapo’s most wanted spies now, honored with a signature cocktail—was among the hotel’s famous patrons. Guests should consider a toast to London’s enduring role as the capital of espionage.

(Related: These mansion museums reveal the grittier side of the Gilded Age.)