GCHQ breaks tradition by announcing new base will be above Manchester restaurant

Britain’s spy agency GCHQ has announced it will open a base above a restaurant in central Manchester in an uncharacteristic bout of openness for the usually secretive organisation.

Heron House, nestled next to a Slug and Lettuce in the city’s Albert Square, is being refurbished and will host as many as 1,000 staff when it officially opens later this year.

Bosses at the agency said the city had been chosen so the organisation can easily recruit some of its 100,000-strong student population and that the idea of top secret intelligence work taking place in a city centre was “revolutionary”.

The organisation’s HQ is in Cheltenham but it also has bases in Bude, Cornwall, and Scarborough. Earlier this year it was revealed that a drab office building opposite St James’s Park tube station in London was a secret GCHQ base used by spooks for 66 years.

GCHQ said staff at the Manchester facility will use “cutting-edge technology and technical ingenuity to identify and disrupt threats to the UK”.

Jeremy Fleming, the organisation’s director, said the “unprecedented” pace of change in the world was creating “complexity, uncertainty and risk” and that it was vital his agency adapted.

In an interview with the Sunday Times, the new Manchester station chief, named only as Simon, said the country is struggling to keep up with the sheer number of child sex offenders at large and that part of his team’s role will be to “pursue the bad people”.

"There is no barbed-wire fence here," he said. "We have announced we are here, and our building is here. Top secret intelligence being done in a city centre is a revolutionary thing."

GCHQ works alongside the other British intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6 to identify and tackle threats to the country.

Established in 1919 as the Government Code & Cypher School, it was once based at Bletchley Park where its operatives, including Alan Turing, cracked the German Enigma code machine – a vital breakthrough credited with hastening the end of the Second World War.

The Manchester office is not GCHQ’s first city centre base. The National Cyber Security Centre, part of the larger agency, opened an office in London Victoria in 2017.