Elstree Studios

• 1. Britain's Film Country

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  Elstree Studios, near the Hertfordshire town of Borehamwood, gave Britain its first sound film in 1929. Alfred Hitchcock shot it at the stages on Shenley Road. The film was Blackmail, and it came just as silent cinema was giving way to sound.

  The name 'Elstree' has always carried a mild deception. Most of the studios it describes are not in Elstree itself but in the adjacent town of Borehamwood. When film production arrived in the area in 1914, Elstree was the larger settlement. It lent its name to the railway station, the telephone exchange, and the civil parish. Borehamwood eventually grew to surpass it. The name stayed.

  Over more than a century, the sites in and around Borehamwood hosted productions spanning silent films to long-running soap operas. Several of the studios were demolished. Others changed ownership so many times that tracking their names requires a timeline. How those that survived managed to do so is worth asking. Financial instability, wartime requisition, and near-demolition orders each came close to ending the whole enterprise.

• 2. Television's Quiet Hub

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  The Neptune Film Company built the first film stages on Eldon Avenue in Borehamwood. The studio changed hands repeatedly over the following decades. Production ceased in 1917, and the site was sold to the Ideal Film Company, which used it until 1924.

  In 1928, a new owner arrived: Ludwig Blattner. He connected the studio to the electricity mains and installed a German system of sound recording. Blattner's investment arrived at precisely the moment when sound cinema was becoming standard. The studio was leased to Joe Rock Productions in 1934 and purchased outright two years later. Rock built four new large stages on the site.

  The British National Films Company held the site between 1939 and 1948. During those years, the government requisitioned a large portion of the facility for war work.

  In 1953, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. bought the studios for television production. They were later sold to Lew Grade's Associated Television, known as ATV, which made the Eldon Avenue complex its main television production hub. The smaller Studios A and B served schools programmes and sitcoms. Studio C was configured for drama. Studio D, fitted with permanent audience seating, handled light entertainment. The Morecambe and Wise series Two of a Kind ran in that studio from 1961 to 1968. The Muppet Show followed, produced there from 1976 to 1981.

  When the Independent Broadcasting Authority renewed ATV's licence in 1982, one condition required the company to shed its London-centric facilities. It was also required to redirect its focus toward the Midlands, the ITV region it served. ATV was restructured as Central Independent Television. The Eldon Avenue studios remained under Central's management until July 1983.

  The BBC acquired the Elstree site in 1984 to produce a new soap opera. EastEnders first aired on the 19th of February 1985 and has been made at Eldon Avenue ever since. Other programmes produced there include Top of the Pops, 'Allo 'Allo!, Grange Hill, Holby City, and Hangar 17. Most of the site is now devoted to EastEnders production.

  While Eldon Avenue became television's base in Borehamwood, the studios on Shenley Road were accumulating a very different list of credits.

• 3. The Shenley Road Stages

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  British National Pictures Ltd purchased forty acres on the south side of Shenley Road in Borehamwood in 1925. Construction of two large film stages began immediately. The first production to emerge from the new facility was Madame Pompadour in 1927. The company soon renamed itself British International Pictures and added a second stage in 1928.

  At the close of the silent era, six new sound stages were built on the site. Three of them were sold to the British and Dominions Film Corporation. British International Pictures became Associated British Picture Corporation, or ABPC, in 1933.

  The War Office used the studios for storage during the Second World War. Production resumed afterward, and in 1946 Warner Brothers acquired a substantial interest in ABPC, appointed a new board, and decided to rebuild the stages.

  In 1969, EMI gained control of ABPC and renamed the site EMI-Elstree Studios. That same year, Bryan Forbes was appointed head of production. His tenure proved short-lived. The period was marked by financial difficulties, brought about by deliberately withheld funding and a series of failed projects. Forbes resigned in 1971. From 1970 to 1973, while EMI held a production and distribution deal with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the facility operated under the name EMI-MGM Elstree Studios.

  Other studio complexes in the area had their own turbulent histories. One had been acquired by MGM in 1944; another had burned to the ground in 1936.

• 4. Korda, MGM, and Fire

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  In 1930, the British and Dominions Film Corporation purchased three new sound stages from British International Pictures on the adjoining site at Borehamwood. The purchase was made before construction of the stages was even complete. They named the site Imperial Studios.

  The most significant production to emerge from Imperial was Alexander Korda's The Private Life of Henry VIII, released in 1933. Charles Laughton played the king. The film's success in the United States and elsewhere persuaded both United Artists and The Prudential to invest in Korda's proposed Denham Film Studios.

  Imperial lasted just six years. In 1936, fire destroyed all three of its stages. British and Dominions redirected its investment to Pinewood Studios at Iver Heath in Buckinghamshire. The remaining support buildings were sold to various companies. One of them, Frank Landsdown Ltd, opened a film vault service on the site. The Rank Organisation bought the music stage for documentary film production; it later became the headquarters of the film and sound-effect libraries.

  Amalgamated Studios Ltd constructed a large studio on the north side of Elstree Way between 1935 and 1937. Its plans collapsed before a film was made there. The facility passed to Rank, who never used it for film production, then briefly to the Prudential. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer purchased the studio in 1944 and renamed it MGM-British Studios.

  After improvements, the MGM facility contained seven stages totalling over seventy thousand square feet of floor space. MGM sometimes leased the studios to other production companies. The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, a 1958 film produced by 20th Century Fox, required a set representing a Chinese town complete with artificial lakes. That set covered five hundred thousand square feet.

  In 1968, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey occupied several stages over an extended production schedule. The film is sometimes cited as the reason the studios became financially unviable. MGM closed the facility in 1970. The American company formed a short-lived deal with EMI before the site of its former studios was redeveloped for industrial use and housing.

• 5. Star Wars and Survival

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  In August 1973, Andrew Mitchell MBE took over from Ian Scott as managing director of the Shenley Road studios. He was almost immediately given an instruction: close the facility and lay off every member of staff.

  The closure was resisted. The studios survived, but at a cost. Significant numbers of staff were let go, and some facilities were closed. The reduced operation waited for a production large enough to change its fortunes.

  Star Wars arrived in 1977. The film was produced at the Shenley Road studios, and its success reestablished the facility as a major production site. Director Steven Spielberg was also drawn to Borehamwood as a result. Subsequent George Lucas projects, including the Star Wars sequels and the Indiana Jones franchise, continued to use the studios.

  In 1979, Thorn Electrical Industries merged with EMI, following EMI's debacle with its invention of the CT scanner. The studios were renamed Thorn-EMI Elstree Studios.

  By 1985, the studios had been put up for sale. An entertainment and property company called Brent Walker acquired part of the largely derelict backlot and demolished it. Nineteen acres were sold to Tesco plc for the construction of a superstore. A working film studio was beginning to look like a real estate transaction.

  A local campaign reversed that trajectory. Paul Welsh MBE, a writer and historian based in the area, led the Save Our Studios effort. Hertsmere Borough Council responded by purchasing the remaining site in February 1996 for two million pounds. The council then invested a further ten million pounds in renovations and the construction of two brand new stages. Welsh later estimated that Hertsmere ratepayers were receiving a fifteen percent annual return on the original investment.

  In 2000, a management company called Elstree Film and Television Studios Ltd was appointed to run the facility. Several other studio sites in Borehamwood had no such campaigns to save them, and their stories ended differently.

• 6. Studios That Came and Went

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  A single large stage was built on Station Road in Borehamwood in 1928 by a company called Whitehall Films Ltd. It was wound up just two years later.

  Julius Hagen, who also owned Twickenham Studios, bought the property in 1935 and formed JH Studios. Financial difficulties arrived quickly. By 1937, Hagen had sold the studios to MP Productions, owned by a producer named J Banberger. The government used the building for storage during the Second World War. In 1950, J. Arthur Rank purchased the site, renamed it Gate Studios, and used it to produce religious films. Production ceased in 1957. The building was sold to Andrew Harkness, a manufacturer of cinema screens. Harkness Screens occupied the site for nearly five decades, moving out in 2004 after establishing manufacturing operations in France and the United States and relocating its British production to Stevenage. The building on Station Road was demolished in 2006 to make way for apartments. The development was named Gate Studios, in homage to the site's former use.

  In 1956, the Danziger brothers converted a wartime plane engine testing factory into a film studio. They called it New Elstree, and it was situated to the west of the Aldenham Reservoir. The site covered 7.5 acres and contained six sound stages, with a workforce of two hundred people. Its output was mainly second features and television series. The studio closed by 1962 and was sold in 1965. The site is now occupied by a business park called The Waterfront, on the A411 Elstree Road.

  Millennium Studios, established in 1993 on the south side of Elstree Way, operated on a smaller scale. Productions filmed there include the first series of CBBC's The Mysti Show in 2004 and one year of Channel 5's Trisha Goddard in 2005. Millennium Studios relocated to Thurleigh near Bedford in 2010. A single television studio called Studio 2000 remains on the Borehamwood site and has been used for the Channel 4 series Rude Tube.

  While most of these studios closed or contracted, two major sites in Borehamwood remain in production, and a third is under construction.

• 7. Borehamwood Today

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  Two sites remain actively producing work in Borehamwood: Elstree Studios on Shenley Road and the BBC Elstree Centre on Eldon Avenue. Shenley Road serves as the permanent home of BBC Studioworks while Television Centre undergoes redevelopment. Productions recorded there include Strictly Come Dancing and Pointless.

  In December 2019, the media company Sky announced plans to develop a new studio complex at Rowley Lane in Borehamwood. Sky Studios Elstree is expected to have thirteen stages, with the smallest measuring approximately 1,800 square metres. The plans also include post-production facilities and an on-site screening cinema. A further ten stages could be added under an extension proposal called Sky Studios Elstree North.

  Films produced at Borehamwood studios include The Dam Busters from 1955, Moby Dick from 1956, and Summer Holiday from 1963. Where Eagles Dare from 1968, Goodbye, Mr. Chips from 1969, and The Shining from 1980 followed. Television productions from the various Elstree sites include The Avengers, Danger Man, The Prisoner, UFO, Robot Wars, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, and Big Brother. In November 1975, Queen filmed the music video for Bohemian Rhapsody at Elstree.

  The Hertswood Studios proposal would bring twenty-one additional stages to Borehamwood, immediately to the north of the planned Sky Studios Elstree North site.