2 Carlton Gardens, SW1

The house on this tiny street running between Carlton House Terrace and Pall Mall was home to silkily villainous Mr Beshraavi (“I'm a very Arabian Arab, I'm afraid”, intones Mancunian Alan Badel, in brownface) in Stanley Donen's lightweight Sixties adventure Arabesque.

The house seems to have been moved to Regent's Park. When Oxford prof David Pollock (Gregory Peck) and Yasmin Azir (Sophia Loren – OK, racially sensitive casting is not one of the movie's better points) escape the house and flee down the flight of steps alongside it, they emerge, not on the Mall, but by London Zoo.

The same house is pointed out by psychic Robert Lees (Donald Sutherland) to a sceptical Inspector Foxborough (David Hemmings) as the home of the killer in the Sherlock Holmes-Jack the Ripper mystery Murder By Decree.

Trivia: now the Privy Council Office, and once home to Lord Kitchener, the mansion used to house Section Y, the arm of the British Secret Intelligence Service responsible for technical operations against the former Soviet Union.

Arabesque (1966, dir: Stanley Donen)
Murder By Decree (1979, dir: Bob Clark)