Poland Street

Poland Street is in Westminster, London W1F, UK. It runs South from Oxford Street roughly half way between the Underground stations at Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Circus. It ends at a junction with Broadwick Street.

Poland Street used to house an array of radical groups (some on the right, but mostly on the left). Described in the press as the centre for ‘the counter-civil service’, 9 Poland Street provided a base set up by The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust (JRT), that housed Friends of the Earth, the Low Pay Unit, the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, Socialist Society, the Tory Reform Group and the 300 Group, among many others.

The forerunner of the CPBF was the Campaign for Press Freedom also based at No.9.

<googlemap version="0.9" lat="51.514545" lon="-0.136632" zoom="17"> 51.514534, -0.137017, Poland St Poland St Westminster, London, W1F, England </googlemap>

Spying on the left

In 1983 the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom engaged 'in war of words with the Freedom Association, a right-wing organization which has expressed, among other things, pro-Pinochet sentiments. Furthermore, the FA has launched ad hominem attacks on the CPBF and sent members to monitor the Campaign's meetings. Jennings warns against provoking 'sensitive' racists and fascists to sue them.'

Bose & Schachhuber's index of the CPBF journal Free Press shows that Poland Street’s State Research and CPBF and others, were exposing SIS operations, and were engaged from the late 1970s in: an exposure of a “Press Plot Against CND” involving “systematic attempts to discredit disarmament groups by insinuating ‘KGB links’”; detailing how the Social Democratic Party had “tried to discredit the left by persuading the Sunday Times to smear Labour MPs”; screening banned films such as the ‘Zircon Project’, and also engaging in work around the Miner’s Strike. Several members of the group had been under arrest and surveillance, such as Crispin Aubrey and Duncan Campbell who, along with State Research, were at the forefront of a campaign to show how ‘national security’ should be closer to ‘political consciousness’.

According to the Guardian in 1985:

A foreign company which builds nuclear reactors was yesterday believed likely to be the client of a consultancy firm which used a private detective agency to discover information about objectors appearing at the Sizewell power station inquiry. The agency was hired to discover the names, addresses and political leanings of objectors. and that presented no problem. All the information was freely available, from the secretariat of the inquiry into the proposed pounds 1.2 billion power station, or from reading newspapers.

The Observer newspaper yesterday said that a firm of security consultants run by a former military intelligence officer declined to name who had commissioned the operation, which was also set to discover protesters' links with the media. But the Guardian understands that the foreign company was interested in assessing the quality and strength of objection to Britain's first pressurised water reactor, in order to plan its own future building strategy.

The detective quickly gathered the names and addresses of involved pressure groups, including the Town and Country Planning Association, the East Anglian Alliance, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and CND. The report noted that Friends of the Earth shared offices in London 'with a number of organisations of the extreme left.' Friends of the Earth had at the time been listed in the telephone - book as being at 9, Poland Street, London W1, an address occupied by a number of ginger groups and owned by the Rowntree Trust, formed by the chocolate making Quaker family.