From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Gainsborough Pictures was a film studio based in Poole Street, Hoxton in the London Borough of Hackney, active between 1924 and 1951. Built as a power station for the Metropolitan Railway, and later converted to studios, the former studios were demolished in 2002 and apartments built on the site in 2004. A London Borough of Hackney historical plaque is attached to the building^[1]

Gainsborough was founded in 1924 by Michael Balcon and was a sister company to the Gaumont-British Picture Corporation from 1927, with Balcon as Director of Production for both studios. Whilst Gaumont-British, based at Lime Grove Studios in Shepherd's Bush produced the 'quality' films, Gainsborough mainly produced 'B' movies and melodramas. Both studios used continental film practices, especially those from Germany, with Alfred Hitchcock being encouraged by Balcon -- who had links with UFA -- to study there and make multilingual co-production films with UFA, before the war. In the 1930s Conrad Veidt, Mutz Greenbaum, Alfred Junge, Elizabeth Bergner and Berthold Viertel, along with others, joined the two studios^[2].

After the departure of Balcon to the British arm of MGM, the Rank Organisation took an interest in Gainsborough and popular films such as Oh, Mr Porter! (1937) were made. By 1937 Gaumont-British were in financial crisis, and closed their Lime Grove studios, moving all production to the Poole Street studio. During World War II, the tall factory chimney on the site was considered dangerous in the event of bombing, and Gainsborough Studios were evacuated to Lime Grove for the duration of the war.^[3]

From 1942 to 1946 a series of morally ambivalent costume melodramas were produced by Gainsborough for the domestic market mostly based on recent popular books by female novelists. These included The Man in Grey (1943), Madonna of the Seven Moons (1944), Fanny by Gaslight (1944), The Wicked Lady (1945) and Caravan (1946) based around a stable of British actors including Margaret Lockwood, James Mason, Stewart Granger and Patricia Roc. The studio also made modern-dress comedies and melodramas such as Love Story (1944), Time Flies (starring Tommy Handley, 1944), Bees in Paradise (with Arthur Askey directed by Val Guest, 1944), They Were Sisters (1945), and Easy Money (1948).

Subsequent productions, led by Betty Box (who at the time was the only major female producer in British cinema), included Miranda (1948) and the Huggett family series with Jack Warner, Kathleen Harrison, and Petula Clark. Unhappy with the performance of the studio, Rank closed it in early 1951.

The Lime Grove site was taken over by the BBC in 1949 and used for TV current affairs and other programmes until it closed in 1991. The buildings were demolished in the early '90s, and replaced with housing called Gaumont Terrace and Gainsborough Court.

The former studios, in Poole Street, remained largely derelict after their closure in 1951 - apart from occasional art performances, including a closing Hitchcock season in October 2003^[4]. The buildings began to be cleared in 2002, and apartments named Gainsborough Studios were built on the site in 2004, by architects Munkenbeck and Marshall.^[5]

• Cook, Pam (ed), Gainsborough Pictures (1997);
• Harper, Sue, Picturing the Past: the Rise and Fall of the British Costume Film (1994);
• Harper, Sue, Women in British Cinema (2000).

• Gainsborough Pictures at the British Film Institute's Screenonline