Five... Pieces of London's Kubrickian History
50s Americana and brutalist near-future dystopias: get you a city that can do both
Hi and welcome to your weekend newsletter… 🎥
This week’s edition’s a handful of places in London where you can tread in Kubrick’s footsteps.
The (maybe apocryphal) story is that the director came to the UK for research and then stayed for the rest of his life - settling in Hertfordshire - because he hated air travel so violently that he’d stretch the concept of on-location to its absolute limits in order to avoid leaving the country. Post-Strangelove, Kubrick birthed (laid?) all of his oeuvre within a 2hr drive of London.
Thanks for much of the info here to who, apart from having a huge amount of Kubrick trivia at his fingertips, is also editor of a Croydon-centric newsletter launching this month
Beckton Gas Works
If you’ve ever started or ended at flight at London City Airport, you’ve probably had a great birds-eye view of one of the major locations in Full Metal Jacket. Beckton Gas Works, just a few minutes from the airport, became the setting for the Vietnamese city of Hue in the second half of the film.
In This Other London, John Rogers makes the pilgrimage to faux-Bec Phu hoping to find palm trees leftover from those Kubrick shipped in as set dressing, but finds the area lower in tropical trees and higher in highstreet megachains than its Kubrick era: ‘The squad at the heart of the film gets lost somewhere near Tesco and comes under fire from a sniper that I'd place somewhere between WH Smith and Sports Direct.’
It’s not the only time the gas works starred on the silver screen - Roger Moore also wrestled with a helicopter over them in the opening scenes of For Your Eyes Only, and they featured as part of the dystopian landscape in the 1984 adaptation of… yup, Orwell’s 1984.