Twickenham Film Studios

• 1. Introduction

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  Twickenham Film Studios sits in St Margarets, in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, and it has been drawing filmmakers through its doors since 1913. Ralph Jupp established it on the site of a former ice rink, and from the very beginning it set its ambitions high: at the moment of its original construction, it was the largest film studio in the United Kingdom. More than a century later, the same complex has hosted the Beatles, Roman Polanski, Ridley Scott, and Peter Jackson. How did a studio built on a repurposed ice rink outlast empires, bankruptcy, and the near-total collapse of British filmmaking? And what does it say about the endurance of a place when the stories made within it keep finding new audiences decades on?

• 2. London Film and the First War

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  The newly formed London Film Company constructed the studios in 1913, and the facility quickly became a central hub for British production during the First World War. London Film was a leading producer across those years, and the studio's scale gave it an advantage few rivals could match. The company struggled once peacetime arrived, however, and by 1920 it had gone out of business entirely. Twickenham Studios passed out of London Film's hands and drifted into use by independent productions, waiting for someone with the drive to build it back into something permanent.

• 3. Julius Hagen's Quickie Factory

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  Julius Hagen took control of the studio during the 1930s and turned it into something closer to a machine than a creative workshop. Major American studios were required by law to produce a certain number of British films each year before they could release their pictures into the British market, and Hagen understood that requirement as a business opportunity. He became extraordinarily efficient at manufacturing what the industry called Quota quickies: films of varying quality, produced at speed and volume. He filmed all day, then brought in fresh crews and actors to work straight through the night. The success of Alexander Korda's The Private Life of Henry VIII in 1933 appears to have shifted Hagen's sense of what was possible. He began chasing an international audience, taking on more ambitious work such as the Gracie Fields vehicle This Week of Grace, then going further with productions like Seymour Hicks's Scrooge in 1935 and Spy of Napoleon. He invested £100,000 rebuilding Twickenham Studios, acquired additional studios elsewhere in London, and broke with his established distributors to try selling his own films. The major American studios blocked his entry into their market, and his films failed to reach British audiences through the channels he hoped. In 1937, Hagen's company went bankrupt, part of a wider slump in British filmmaking that year. Carol Reed's The Stars Look Down, made in 1939, is among the films that followed his departure.

• 4. Post-War Consolidation

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  In 1946, Alfred Shipman formed Alliance Film Studios Limited, bringing Riverside, Southall, and Twickenham Film Studios under a single ownership structure. When Shipman died in 1956, his two sons Gerald and Kenneth took over. Gerald is the father of Piers Flint-Shipman. Kenneth later went on to establish Alliance Film Distributors, extending the family's reach from production into distribution. The post-war years reoriented the studio from the scrappy independent productions of the interwar period into a more settled corporate structure, one that would carry it into the creative explosion of the 1960s.

• 5. The Beatles and the 1960s

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  A Hard Day's Night, released in 1964, was the first of two Beatles feature films made at Twickenham, followed by Help! in 1965. The studio also hosted the promotional film for "Hey Jude" in 1968. The Beatles later used the complex while rehearsing music for the album Let It Be; a film was made of some of those sessions, and both the album and the film were released in 1970. Footage from Twickenham formed the setting of the first part of a three-part documentary about those sessions, directed by Peter Jackson. Other films from that decade include Roman Polanski's first English language film, Repulsion, in 1965; Alfie in 1966, starring Michael Caine; and The Italian Job in 1969, featuring Caine alongside Noel Coward. Be My Guest, also from 1965, includes an early screen appearance by Steve Marriott alongside Jerry Lee Lewis and The Nashville Teens.

• 6. Stage 1 and the Sound Infrastructure

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  Twickenham Film Studios operates three sound-proofed stages on a four-wall basis, meaning clients take full control of the space rather than sharing it with studio staff. Stage 1 is the largest, and it contains a concrete water tank housed beneath the floorboards, with a camera pit at one end that allows underwater viewing through a glass screen. A Hard Day's Night and Help!, An American Werewolf in London from 1981, A Fish Called Wanda from 1988, and Kenneth Branagh's Sleuth from 2007 were all shot on Stage 1. Stage 3 has its own distinguished roster: Polanski's Repulsion, Karel Reisz's The French Lieutenant's Woman in 1981, Lewis Gilbert's Shirley Valentine in 1989, Matthew Vaughn's Layer Cake in 2004, Mike Newell's Love in the Time of Cholera in 2007, and Before I Go To Sleep in 2014, written and directed by Rowan Joffe with Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth. The post-production wing centers on the refurbished Richard Attenborough Theatre, named after Richard Attenborough, who kept his production offices at the studios. The facility holds Dolby Premier certification and is equipped with 4K DCI Projection and HDX Pro Tools rigs in its dubbing theatres, a standard the studio describes as making it the most advanced sound department in the UK.

• 7. Near Closure and New Ownership

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  In February 2012, the studio went into administration, and an announcement confirmed it would close before June of that year, just twelve months before its centenary. The closure did not come. A new owner acquired the studio in August 2012, and the facility continued operating. In February 2020, The Creative District Improvement Co. acquired Twickenham Film Studios with financial backing from British Airways Pension Fund, with TIME + SPACE Studios taking on the role of operator under a long lease. Recent productions at the studio include Kenneth Branagh's Belfast, Top Gun: Maverick, the Oscar-winning Bohemian Rhapsody, Last Night in Soho, and House of Gucci, alongside script-to-screen work on Ten Percent, the British remake of the French series Call My Agent.