IAN LONG GRAPHICS
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Ghost London on Film #1 - Elkstone Road, 1967

7/8/2015

8 Comments

 
It's interesting how, within a few years of its making - sometimes even less - a film can become a "storage vat of regional memory" (a phrase coined by Deep Topographer Nick Papadimitriou) as the locations where it was shot change or disappear.

Why should one small corner of the world rather than another become a candidate for this kind of immortality? Many of the choices made by film crews probably depend as much on brute practicality - cheapness, accessibility, permission - as on any deeper considerations. And countless yet more poignant fragments of visual information may have been discarded on forgotten cutting-room floors, swept up in bins and bulldozed into oozing landfill many decades ago.

Even so, films sometimes offer us the only chance we will get to explore long-gone neighbourhoods and intuit the lives that were led in them.

A few seconds of footage from Bedazzled (1967), directed by Stanley Donen and written by Peter Cook, allow us to reconstruct one particular vanished corner of London, already on its last legs even when the film was made. Of course, it's just a partial view; many details of the area's geography remain tantalisingly beyond our grasp, and to bring our own imaginations to bear we may need to sidestep the aesthetic imposed by the director, cinematographer and art department.

Now a stone's throw from Erno Goldfinger's Trellick Tower, Elkstone Road runs from the Great Western Road, past Meanwhile Gardens and towards Golborne Road, which crosses the railway on a metal bridge painted black at the time of filming, but now a gleaming white.

Southam Street, which continues Elkstone Road after it crosses Golborne Road, is well-documented in Roger Mayne's famous photographs and Colin MacInnes's novel Absolute Beginners, but Elkstone Road is less known. 

We screened Bedazzled at West Hampstead Cinema Club on Friday July 3rd 2015, and Peter Cook's friend "Rainbow" George Weiss came along to share some memories with us; the screening, and my investigation of the film's locations, inspired this short piece.

8 Comments
Nathalie
7/8/2015 12:27:29 pm

Lovely piece. Have you seen Le Ballon Rouge? Another wonderful example of a vanished location; the ghost of Ménilmontant in Paris.

Reply
Ian
7/8/2015 04:27:46 pm

Hi Nathalie, many thanks for your comment. I dimly remember seeing Le Ballon Rouge in childhood, but it would be interesting to watch it again with your remarks in mind. Maybe you could do a Ghost Paris on Film sister blog?
I'll be adding more examples of vanished London locations in due course - watch this space.

Reply
Nathalie
7/9/2015 04:53:30 am

Piet Schreuders has done a lovely 'then and now' of Le Ballon Rouge that can be found here - https://www.flickr.com/photos/pietschreuders/sets/72157612003486040

Where they haven't fallen to redevelopment, the bare bones do still exist. The poetry has suffered though, hidden under layers of fresh paint, bad signage, tarmac, practical everyday modern life...

Alan Price link
7/8/2015 04:37:54 pm

A very good piece, Ian. Look forward to other writings on this subject.
Bray, the block I live in, has had numerous cinematic lives. It can be glimpsed just in the background of the over-filmed Primose Hill. Most notably in Mike Leigh's Working Girls. Of course my home and my park are not part of a vanished landscape, yet. But in a 100 years time, when historians plough through the archive of old London films, and the hill has been built on, and a new bigger tower's been erected, then mortality will await them!

Reply
Ian
7/8/2015 04:47:12 pm

Thanks, Alan. Of course, Primrose Hill nearly became a vast "Pyramid of Death" as far back as the 19th century.

http://www.wondersandmarvels.com/2012/06/metropolitan_sepulchre.html

Reply
peter herbert link
7/9/2015 01:11:18 am

fascinating..we live where Desmond Daves SMASHING TIME was once filmed in 1967 with eerie memories of what once was in Gospel Oak

Reply
Ian
7/9/2015 02:10:22 am

Queen's Crescent turns up in Alberto Cavalcanti's The Monster of Highgate Ponds ... we're going to show it as part of a Cavalcanti evening soon.

Reply
Larry Porter link
11/17/2022 03:29:49 am

Upon hundred everybody system customer describe go. Play unit sometimes political recently. Attention we board report author left.

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    Author

    I'm a screenwriter, script editor and graphic artist, and I also teach workshops on various aspects of screenwriting.

    These are some thoughts about film and the visual side of things.

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  • Home
  • People
    • Authors and Translators
    • airport people
    • In From the Cold
    • Literally Swiss
    • Traditional Korean Music
    • Peoplewatching
    • Life Drawings
    • Fetish People >
      • Detention
  • Work
    • Sketchbooks
    • Illustrations
    • Posters
    • Landscapes >
      • Videos
      • Skeletons and Insects >
        • Experimental Work
        • Off the Page
        • That Darn Fly
        • Doggin' Around
        • Woodcuts
      • cityscape
    • Imaginary Books
    • An Anatomical Portrait
  • Animals
  • Contact
  • Blog
  • Live Drawing for Events
  • Writing Workshops
    • Neo Noir and the Dark Thriller
    • Writing Science Fiction
    • Writing Horror Now
    • Creating Fear in Films