The oldest working film studio in the world is on a suburban green in W5
Pictures have been made on Ealing Green since 1902. The sound stages that went up in 1931 are listed, and they are still working — which is precisely why you cannot take a group inside.
Most towns with a famous film studio have built a tour around it by now. Ealing has not, and the reason is the whole point of the place: the stages are still in use. Ealing Studios describes itself as the oldest continuously working studio facility for film production in the world, and the word doing the work in that sentence is continuously.
It started with a house. In 1902 the film pioneer Will Barker acquired the White Lodge on Ealing Green as a base for making films. One of the first screen versions of Hamlet came out of the site in 1910. This was a suburban garden with a glasshouse stage in it, two decades before anyone in Britain had a word for a film industry.
The stages that are still standing
The buildings that matter came later. The theatre producer Basil Dean took the site at the end of the 1920s and founded Associated Talking Pictures; the purpose-built sound stages opened in 1931 and are now Grade II listed. They are not a monument. Productions still go into them, which is the single most Ealing thing about Ealing: the listed building is the working building.
Balcon, and the seventeen years everybody remembers
Michael Balcon replaced Dean in 1938, arriving from MGM. He dropped the Associated Talking Pictures name and began releasing under the studio’s own. Through the war the output was documentary-hard — Went the Day Well?, The Foreman Went to France, Undercover. After it came the run that made the name a genre: Whisky Galore! and Kind Hearts and Coronets in 1949, The Lavender Hill Mob in 1951, The Man in the White Suit, The Titfield Thunderbolt, and The Ladykillers in 1955.
1955 was also the end of it. The BBC bought the studios on Ealing Green for £300,000. Balcon left a plaque on the wall, its wording usually given as:
“Here during a quarter of a century were made many films projecting Britain and the British character.”Wording as reported by film historians; the plaque remains on the studio wall
It is an odd, slightly defensive sentence for a man to write about his own seventeen years, and it has outlasted almost everything else on the street.
What happened next, which nobody tells you
The BBC used the stages for decades — Doctor Who, Monty Python, Porridge — then sold the site in 1993 for around £6 million. A consortium bought it in 2000 and feature production restarted. Since then the same 1931 stages have carried The Importance of Being Earnest, Downton Abbey, The Crown and Darkest Hour. The Met Film School operates on the site, so there are students walking past the stages on a Tuesday morning as well as crews.
The other half of Ealing Green
Here is the part that makes this a piece about Ealing rather than about cinema. Ealing Green is a short stretch of road, and the studio is only one side of it. A few doors down stands Pitzhanger Manor — Sir John Soane’s own country villa, which he designed and built for himself from 1800, Grade I listed since 1950. Behind it lies Walpole Park, the villa’s original grounds, bought by Ealing Urban District Council from Sir Spencer Walpole in 1900 and opened to the public in 1901.
Read those dates together. The council opened Soane’s garden to the public in 1901. Will Barker bought his lodge to start making films in 1902. Within two years and a couple of hundred metres, Ealing acquired both the park it is still known for and the studio it is still known for — and both are still doing the thing they were opened to do.
For a group, the practical version is short. The studio has no public tour, so we set down at the corner of Mattock Lane and Ealing Green, the party walks the studio frontage from the pavement, and the visit itself is Pitzhanger and the park. One kerb, three centuries, no car park.