London’s embassies usually behave as you expect them to. They cluster in the expensive bits, drape themselves in flags, and occupy buildings that look as though they were designed for whispered diplomacy and carpets thick enough to swallow a scandal.
Then there is North Korea’s embassy in London, which has chosen a different aesthetic entirely: detached house on a busy road in Ealing. Not Belgravia. Not Kensington. Not even one of those grand stucco crescents that seem to exist mainly so chauffeured cars can idle outside them. Official UK government travel advice and diplomatic listings place the Embassy of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea at 73 Gunnersbury Avenue, London W5 4LP.
That is what makes it one of the capital’s strangest official addresses. On paper, this is the London outpost of one of the most secretive and authoritarian states on earth. In practice, it looks more like the kind of property that might once have belonged to a prosperous orthodontist with a fondness for rose bushes. Londonist notes that it sits in a 1920s family home on the North Circular, a setting so stubbornly suburban that it feels faintly comic. Pyongyang by way of Ealing Broadway.
The North Korean state has had a presence here since 2003, when the property was bought for embassy use. This is not some pop-up diplomatic experiment. It has been there for years, quietly existing in that very London way where the improbable becomes oddly ordinary.
It is also a real, functioning embassy, not merely an urban curiosity for people who enjoy odd addresses. The UK government’s current travel advice for North Korea tells visa applicants and enquirers to contact the embassy in London directly, listing its phone number and email address. So if, for reasons best known to yourself, you are planning a trip to one of the world’s most tightly controlled countries, part of that administrative journey may begin in west London traffic. That is a sentence London somehow makes possible.
Of course, the embassy’s fascination is not just architectural. It has also brushed against real international drama. In 2016, Thae Yong Ho, North Korea’s deputy ambassador in London, defected to South Korea with his family. Reuters reported that he was one of the highest-ranking North Korean diplomats to defect in years, instantly turning this unassuming house in Ealing into the setting for a major geopolitical story. It was a reminder that behind the net curtains and suburban hedges, something much darker and more consequential than local semi-detached life was unfolding.
That contrast is really the whole appeal. If the American embassy is all steel-and-security seriousness, and the French Embassy all polished diplomatic confidence, North Korea’s mission in London has the air of a place that would rather not be looked at too closely. Which, naturally, makes people want to look at it more. It is not visually dramatic. That is the drama. You expect menace, mystery, spectacle. You get a large house by the North Circular with a flag. It is as if John le Carré had been forced to set a chapter in a location chosen by Rightmove.
Why is North Korea’s embassy in Ealing?
Because it was apparently supposed to be a temporary compromise that became permanent. Britain only established diplomatic relations with North Korea in 2000, so when North Korea bought the house on Gunnersbury Avenue in 2002–03, the understanding reported at the time was that it would serve as the ambassador’s residence while officials searched for somewhere grander and more central. It was a sizeable seven-bedroom 1920s house bought for about £1.3 million, which by embassy standards was inexpensive and offered enough room for staff, receptions and diplomatic use without paying Belgravia money.
London is full of grand sights, but some of its best oddities are the ones that look almost disappointingly normal at first glance. A house. A flag. A crest by the door. And, behind it all, one of the world’s most secretive regimes quietly conducting diplomacy beside the North Circular. That is London for you: never knowingly under-weird.