Sir Roger Moore's London pad is on the market

Sometimes a string of words just sticks in your head. 'Smoother than a bubble bath with Roger Moore' is stuck in mine, ever since I read it in Adam Hay-Nicholls's piece about a new Rolls-Royce a year or so ago. Every time I see or hear anything about the late, great actor, there it is: 'smoother than a bubble bath with Roger Moore' pops into my head, read (of course) in the cheesy-smarmy-tongue-in-cheek voice of 007 himself.

Moore was more than just Bond, of course: he appeared in over 100 films and TV shows in a career spanning seven decades, and many of the roles (notably The Saint) would have been enough in their own right to make him a household name. But to many, Moore is Bond: he took a role played as tough and sardonic by Sean Connery and while never matching the physicality of his predecessor, he made 007 it smooth, charming and fun.

And so today, with Sir Roger's former London pad on the market, all I can think of is the smoothness of a man dubbed 'one of nature's true gentlemen'. And that leads to one question about his flat: what's the bathtub like?

The answer is this:

The bathtub in question is part of the three-bedroom flat on Eaton Square in Belgravia, a glorious, late-Georgian space that's roughly equidistant from Buckingham Palace, Harrods and Sloane Square. As you might expect, property here doesn't come cheap: this duplex apartment, split over the third and fourth floors of the building, is priced at £5.75 million.

Entire houses here generally sit in the £15 million price bracket, and even for someone as successful as Sir Roger — who was paid £1 million for 1972's Live and Let Die alone — having an apartment is plenty. Especially as it was only a part-time home for a man who, rather famously, became a tax exile in 1978, spending most of the rest of his life in Monaco and Switzerland.

The flat is laid out fairly simply: a spacious hallway with sweeping staircase leads to a large reception room looking out to the front, and a knocked-through kitchen and dining room, with balcony, at the back.

At just under 2,000sq ft it's not a large place, but it's more than the average pied-a-terre, and could happily accommodate a small family.

Above, two of the three bedrooms are en-suite, with the master suite at the back of the house having the aforementioned bathtub.

A bubble bath with Roger Moore wouldn't be particularly smooth today, of course, primarily because he died in 2017 at the age of 89. But his legacy lives on, especially for those who grew up with him as Ian Fleming's iconic creation.

They say your favourite 007 is always the first you ever see reaching for his Walther PPK, and for millions across the world Moore will be the man who defined James Bond. Yet as you'd expect from this old smoothie, his knowing self-deprecation was part of the charm: right to the last, he claimed to have been only the fourth-best actor at playing the part. In terms of pure acting chops, that might be true; but none of the others ever made us smile like Roger did.

Roger Moore's former flat on Eaton Square is for sale at £5.75 million via Knight Frank — see more details.