There’s a line from the famous romcom Love Actually when the unlikely prime minister, played by Hugh Grant, asks to be taken “to Wandsworth… the dodgy end.” As a resident of Wandsworth, I have no idea where the dodgy end is — you will have to ask the movie’s director Richard Curtis about that — but I do know that the borough contains an extraordinary secret behind an unassuming façade.
From the outside, No 575 Wandsworth Road is a charming late-Georgian terraced house. Modest, at two storeys high, built in brick and stucco with a basement below and a front door approached by steps and iron railings. Sure, it is pretty, but nothing that Londoners are not used to seeing across the city.
