Noor Inayat Khan Memorial

On the corner of Gordon Square, near her childhood home in Bloomsbury, stands a bronze bust of Noor Inayat Khan, commemorating the British-Indian agent who worked in France during WWII and was tortured and killed by the Germans.

The Noor Memorial Trust led a two-year campaign to erect it and chose the sculptress Karen Newman created it.

On November 8th, 2012, Princess Anne unveiled it. It was the first freestanding memorial in the UK to honor a woman of Asian background.

Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan (1914-1944) was born in Moscow to an Indian-Sufi father and an American mother. Several months later, the family moved to London and settled in Bloomsbury. In 1920, they relocated to France, where Khan studied child psychology and music; she became a writer, publishing poetry and children’s stories in French and English.

Following the outbreak of WWII, the family returned to England. Though Khan was a pacifist and supporter of Indian independence, she wanted to contribute to the war effort, so in November 1940, she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) and trained as a radio operator. Later, the F(France) Section of the Special Operations Executive recruited her and sent her to France as part of a sabotage force in February 1943, the first woman to serve as an undercover radio operator in occupied Europe.

In June, the Gestapo began to hunt down her unit, and within a few months, she was among the few operators still working.

On October 13th, 1943, Khan was captured, and during the 11 months of her imprisonment and frequent questioning and torturing, she refused to hand over information. Eventually, she was sent to the Dachau camp, where she was shot dead on September 12th, 1944. She was 30 years old. In 1949, she was posthumously awarded the George Cross for her heroism and resilience during the war.

Near Gordon Square are the Tavistock Square Gardens, the home of the Virginia Woolf bust and Louisa Brandreth Aldrich-Blake Statue.

Other attractions and historical sites nearby include The British Museum, The foundling museum, St George’s Church, Seven Dials Market, and October Gallery.

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