Tinseltown on Thames : Sets and Settings
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| Hogwarts at Leavesden |
You will have guessed that the Potter films were masterminded from the Warner Studios at Leavesden near Watford. It is one of many films brought to life in the studios around London. Here are just a few that you wouldn't have thought would be among them. All focus on the creation of imagined worlds. Most are blockbusters, but others are here simply because I admired their creativity.
Barbie (2023)
The Warner studios in Leavesden near Watford are far more than the Harry Potter experience which, by the way, is fun, even for old gits like me who haven't seen most of the films. They are also huge, but not quite the size of Pinewood. Link: Warner Bros Leavesden
Barbieland is another example of Hollywood satirising itself. It was created in Leavesden, Watford as a physical set, slightly out of scale with the actors to exacerbate the 'toy' effect and augmented by CGI. The scenes set in the Disney HQ in Los Angeles were in Los Angeles, although Disney does have a large office in London, sitting above Hammersmith Tube Station! Note to visitors. Watford doesn’t look like this.
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| Barbieland in Leavesden |
Set in a cod European city but also shot at Leavesden using huge and detailed sets including the town square with its cathedral and ‘Galeries Gourmet’, based on the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan. There is some digital dodgery. Most of the 'outside' scenes are set in iconic England Locations. (If you can call the tatty Rivoli Ballroom in Brockley 'iconic'!). Youy can get an idea how far they wandered here: Link Wonka Locations
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| Wonka Town |
Annihilation (2018)
PInewood Studios are the daddy, even bigger than Leavesden. This film was based on a Jeff Vandermeer 'weird' novel. He lives in Florida and the book is set in the near future in the tropical, flooded Everglades. Sadly for him the density of vegetation made it difficult to shoot there, so the obvious alternative was Slough where worse things can happen than being turned into a mutant plant. Pinewoods facilities were augmented by outdoor shots in nearby and similarly tropical and eerie Windsor Great Park and also at Marsworth Airfield near Cheddington.
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| The Slough Everglades : Windsor Great Park |
Batman (1989)
This was also filmed at Pinewood which was associated with enough Bond films to have had a local road named after their American producer Albert R. Broccoli. Batman's home Gotham City used up most of their 95 acre backlot. They did venture out so here are a few more locations.. The exterior of Wayne Manor is Knebworth House near Stevenage while the interior is Hatfield House near Welwyn which also later served as Lara Croft's manor. The offices are the Ladies Smoking Room at the St Pancras Hotel - which is still there.
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| Tim Burton & Batmobile at Pinewood |
Take a look: Films at Pinewood
More Batman. And Star Wars.
Cardington Hangers loom like cliffs over the valley of the Great Ouse, south of Bedford. They were originally built over a century ago to house the first giant ‘Zeppelin’ style airships. The attraction to filmmakers is their sheer scale and height which you can see in the pic below, but as they don't offer the range of facilities elsewhere they tend to be used for single-scene sets, notably for the Batman and the Harry Potter series but also the more futuristic Justice League and Star Wars films.
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| Old Airship hangars at Cardington |
There is another oddity to the west of London, near Newbury, in a twist of fate the old Greenham Common Air Force Base near Newbury, which used to house nukes and was the scene of long-lasting anti-nuclear protests in the early 1980's, served as the rebel stronghold on D'Qar in the Star Wars Episode 'The Force Awakens'. You can compare the depiction of it with the remaining structures at the Common below. It is now a large public open space, so you can walk around it.
Alien (1979)
Not a recent film, but a Sci-Fi classic and truly scary as you can see from the original trailer here Link: Alien together with an explanation of how they did it: Keep in mind this was almsot 50 years ago. Link : Making Alien.
The action is set on a space freighter envisaged, built and filmed at Shepperton Studios, near Pinewood and not far from Heathrow. A lot of the extra-terrestrial settings were made at Bray Studios but if you saw it and recall the scene with the alien egg chamber, that was filmed at a decommissioned power station in Acton using lasers borrowed from The Who. They were recording in the adjacent studio at the time. The power station later provided the chemical sludge that engulfed Jack Napier in Batman. For a while you could buy props and stuff left over from the film and rescued from the power station here:
Link: Prop Store Auction
Films_shot_at_Shepperton_Studios
Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)
A quick detour into settings. Most of this was also shot at Pinewood but entertainingly (for me at least) 'The Void', a no-mans-land between the Marvel Universe and our own, was actually Pitstone Quarry equally strangely suspended between the scarp of the Chilterns and the pancake flat Aylesbury Vale near Dunstable. This unremarkable farming country also housed served as the moon Kef Bir in Star Wars 'The Rise of Skywalker’. (Episode 1,346?).
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| The Void : Pitstone Quarry |
...and yet more Star Wars and Wicked
From the ridge above this 'no mans land', if you engage your memory and imagination you can look down on both the remains of the Death Star and the village in ‘Wicked’. (see later). A Lovely place for a walk, although there is now sign of either now. That is perhaps unsurprising, the scrap metal value of a Death Star must be astronomical!
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| Death Star crash near Dunstable |
The Marvel Cinematic Universe was also visited by Dr Strange in the eponymous film series which saw the peripatetic cast globetrotting, but a lot of the filming was done at Longcross Studios in Surrey, using sets for places as remote as Hong Kong and Kathmandu and also making use of VFX trickery.
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| Dr Strange : The Digital District |
Wicked (2024)
The area around Pitstone and nearby Ivinghoe also saw both the Shiz University and Munchkinland in this prequel of The Wizard of Oz with a lot of the shooting done at Warner's in Leavesden while the weird and wonderful building sets were built at the Elstree Studios in Borehamwood. Take a look at this video of the set: The village in 'Wicked'
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| Shiz University |
Avengers 'Age of Ultron' (2015)
Set in our world, but not as we know it. The interior shooting was actually done at Shepperton. And (hilariously) the location of the epic ‘Johannesburg’ fight between Hulk and Iron Man is the bureaucratic cesspit of Brent Civic Centre in Wembley, London. London is rarely been as multicultural as it was required to be in Avengers: Age Of Ultron (out now in the US and UK). This story roamed the globe but as the location manager explained, if you have a film crew of 400 and your main base is in Surrey, you do as much as you can there!
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| Alternative Reality Brent |
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| Battle in Brent Civic Centre |
Brazil (1985)
Full confession. I have not seen some of the films referred to above. My only real interest is in how and where they created the scenes, although in some cases 'why' might be an equally apposite question! So I 'familiarised myself' using YouTube clips. A standout exception from deep cinematic history was Brazil, inspired by Orwell’s 1984, funny, poignant and hopefully not as prescient as it sometimes seemed. Anything with Jonathan Pryce, Robert de Niro, Michael Palin, Bob Hoskins and Jim Broadbent has to be good but for me the retro-futurist sets were the real star.
Even if you are old enough to have seen it, you wouldn't recognise either the grim 'Expediting Department' offices, Archibald Buttle's flat in 'Shangri-La Towers or the place where Sam Lowry was interrogated and tortured. The first and second was the old Co-op flour mill at the Royal Docks. The latter was shot in the interior of the cooling towers at Croydon’s (demolished) Power Station. The rest of it was mostly shot at Wembley Park studios which was to some extent the victim of its own success, with the business moved to Shepperton.
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| Sam Tortured in the old Cooling Tower |
Raiders of the Lost Ark
George Lucas regarded Elstree as a lucky place to film. Their sound stages were used in early Star Wars films and he persuaded Steven Spielberg to use then for the early Indiana Jones films. But it is relatively small and, like Webley Park, the scale of film productions outgrew them. They eventually made a film about their own decline and the studios are not mostly used for TV shows.
There is an intro to it here: The decline of Elstree Studios
Now they mostly stick to TV. ‘Space 1999’ was the last marionette series from Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. Look at the picture below. You have to strain every neuron in your credibility circuit to believe this could be real.
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| Space 1999 |
Anderson has the excuse that it was a puppet show. But how can you excuse this effort from a 'Martian Chronicle' in 1980, also filmed at Shepperton! 1/10 for inventive effort. But at least the cast paired Rock Hudson and Roddy McDowall
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| The Martian Chronicles |
There are so, so many more and while I am sure that most of you haven't seen most of them, my point isn't an exposition but rather to underline the sheer scale of this particular creative industry that sits, unnoticed by many, in our regional backyard. As you can see, the Studios themselves compete and collaborate. Some prosper and some fade. Over time we can expect to see more and better CGI which I suspect will be cheaper but robs us of the wonder of sets built by people probably reared on a diet of Lego and Meccano. I doff my space helmet to them.