Welcome To Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire's Hollywood!
I was asked to write a faux, Pathe-style piece about WGC for Soho Bites. Here's the script. I'll leave the voice to your imagination - think Harry Enfield's era-defying football match.
I'm Richard Luck and welcome to Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire's true home of film!
That's right - ignore Elstree, leave Leavesden well alone; when it comes to finding Hollywood in Herts, your journey begins and ends here in the ground-breaking town that gave Britain '80s pop goddess Kim Wilde, acting great and Give Us A Clue grandee Una Stubbs, and - until the early 1990s - all the Shredded Wheat that was fit to eat, plus plenty that wasn't.
But of course, there's so much more to Welwyn Garden that Nabisco and Nick Faldo. For in 1927, visionary genius AE Bundy had the genius vision that was Welwyn Studios. Located on Broadwater Road, slap-bang in the middle of Welwyn Garden City's manufacturing district, Welwyn Studios was itself a factory - one that produced the stuff of dreams.
The Night Has Eyes (1942), Last Holiday (1950) - just two of the motion pictures that emerged from Welwyn Studios during its brief but breathtaking life span. But what could bring the likes of James Mason and Alec Guinness - stars of the aforementioned films - to lil' ol' Welwyn Garden? It certainly couldn't hurt that the town is but 30 minutes from the heart of London's fashionable London. And what about the local attractions! Rent a paddle boat and take a spin around Stanborough Lakes! Enjoy a half at the Cherry Tree Inn! Or peruse the well-stocked shelves of the Welwyn Department Store! The choice is yours!
Welwyn Studios wasn't just a film-making facility, mind you; it was also a production company - a production company as daring and forward-looking as the town from which it took its name. Were it not for Welwyn Studios, the world might have been denied 1937's salacious Soho-expose Saturday Night Revue. And who else but Welwyn Studios would have had the artistic courage and/or down-right craziness to play home to an adaptation of the Fuhrer's Mein Kampf, and this before tea on the first day in that ultimate test match that was World War II?!
And then of course there was Brighton Rock. Those brave Boulting boys might have shot their exteriors on the south coast but when it came to taking the action inside, Roy and John and young Dickie Attenborough made a bee-line for Broadwater Road!
Like all dreams, you have to wake up eventually, and the harsh realities of the austerity era meant that Welwyn Pictures was a thing of the past come the mid-1950s. Gates that had once opened for Alfred Hitchcock, Bela Lugosi and local girl Dinah Sheridan, were shuttered for the final time in 1957.
But if you could take Welwyn Pictures out of the jewel of the Home Counties, you couldn't take the pictures out of Welwyn Garden City. Whether it's Edgar Wright coming here to film Hot Fuzz and The World's End or Rob Lowe scuttling about shooting that god-awful ITV police drama of his, there will always been moving pictures in this, a garden city that's always on the grow.