Katy Sharp-Watson guides us through some of the East End locations used in famous films.
The original photography on the right of each pair of pictures is by Lowell Stearn-Marsh.
We are all used to famous landmarks such as Big Ben and Tower Bridge cropping up in films. But less known locations in East London, though more difficult to spot, are also often used. London councils can charge up to £3000 for a one-day shoot on their streets, on top of admin costs for services such as providing security and halting traffic. But it is a price worth paying for the authenticity that a real location gives to the final film.
Our journey begins at Liverpool Street Station, used as a location for David Lynch’s The Elephant Man. Remnants of the station’s original Victorian features include the iron roof that you can see when John Merrick arrives back in London from the continent and is chased by a mob desperate to get a glimpse of his face hidden under a paper bag. The pictures below show a still from the original films, on the left, and a shot of the the same location today, on the right.
A ten minutes walk north from here takes you to Bunhill Fields Burial Ground on City Road, the resting place for poet William Blake and a location for Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things. This is where Okwe, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, reveals his secret marriage to Senay, (Audrey Tatuo). The cemetery was almost totally destroyed by bombs in the Second World War, and is now much smaller than it once was.
Northeast of here off the Regents Canal is Broadway Market. The cut throat razor scene at the start of David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises was filmed at number 54, now called The Broadway Gents Hair Stylist, but in the film known as Azim’s Barbershop. The street and its thriving Saturday food and farmers’ market have been affected in good and bad ways by recent gentrification. New economic life has been brought to the area, but the commercial sale of some of the buildings by Hackney Council also led to protests by locals who felt they were being driven out. The street also appears in Odd Man Out from 1947 and the 1988 film Buster. Eastern Promises features other East London locations, including the Thames Barrier and the Ironmonger Row Baths just off Old Street.
Heading back south across Hackney Road and down to Teesdale Street you will find Sol’s pawnshop, which was used in Guy Richie’s Snatch. The East London gangster film became a popular genre in the late 90s and early 2000s, and includes films such as Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Layer Cake and Kidulthood. The shopfront still looks very much like it did in the film, although today the premises are used as a print shop.
A long way further south towards the Tower Gateway DLR station, at the corner of Cable Street and Dock Street, is the site of one of the many East London locations in Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men. This is where Theo (Clive Owen) is released out of the back of a van after being captured by a group of radicals. The site’s position beneath the train lines gives it a gloomy atmosphere, which in the film was lit up with neon signs and moving billboards to create an image of a dark dystopian future.
East of here along the dock is a location used for the James Bond epic The World Is Not Enough starring Pierce Brosnan. The start of the film sees Bond speeding down the Thames in a boat in pursuit of a female nemesis who has tried to assassinate him. The scene climaxes with Bond on a parachute before sliding down the Millennium Dome. In the same scene he impossibly changes location in a few seconds from the Thames by the Houses of Parliament in the West End to the Tobacco Dock in East London. This 19th Century tobacco warehouse was redeveloped in the early 1990s as the ‘Covent Garden of the East End,’ but due to its isolated location and poor transport links went bust, and is now largely unused other than for occasional corporate events and conferences.
Towering above East London is the iconic 1 Canada Square skyscraper completed in 1990 as part of the Canary Wharf development, which contrasts with so much of the rest of the area here that it might be more fitting as part of Hong Kong or New York. In fact Canary Wharf stands in for New York in the 2004 remake of Alfie. The escalator that rises out of the Jubilee Line station here has been used in both 28 Days Later and The Constant Gardener. The photo below is from a scene in 28 Days Later in which Jim (Cillian Murphey) and the other survivors are chased underground by zombies.
In the picture below we can see the nearby bridge at Heron Quays station as it appears in Fernando Mierelles’ The Constant Gardener. Other films shot in Canary Wharf include Johnny English, Basic Instinct 2 and Layer Cake.
At the east most end of the DLR is Beckton, which tourists are unlikely to visit unless they are going to the Gallions Reach shopping park. Unbeknown to many however is the fact that Beckton Gas Works was one of the primary locations for Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant Full Metal Jacket. Kubrick was famously afraid of flying and therefore opted to shoot his films as close to home as possible. So through the addition of neon signs and palm trees Beckton became Vietnam in 1987 for this production, and for a long time you could still see the trees from the road as you drove past. The gas works are now inaccessible to pedestrians and a large chunk of the area is now used as a DLR depot. Other films shot here include the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only and the 1984 film adaptation of George Orwell’s Ninety Eighty Four.