I spy with my little eye... GCHQ’s former digs

SANDWICHED between a Starbucks and a pub, it looks like a standard office block.

But the rooms behind the nondescript black door have been the London home of Britain’s eavesdropping agency GCHQ for almost seven decades. The organisation known as ‘Britain’s listening post’ has only now been able to confirm the location after it moved out of the base on Palmer Street in Westminster. GCHQ director Jeremy Fleming said: ‘As we depart our Palmer Street site after 66 years, we look back on a history full of amazing intelligence, world-leading innovation, and the ingenious people who passed through those secret doors. Then, as now, it’s a history defined by the belief that with the right mix of minds, anything is possible.’ The agency is now based in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, in a building nicknamed the ‘Doughnut’. Plans for the Palmer Street building are not known.

The old: The building on Palmer Street in Westminster housed GCHQ staff for 66 years

And the new: The agency’s ‘Doughnut’ building in Cheltenham