Who's London Spearhead From Space
(September 1970)
The first Doctor Who story I ever remember watching was Jon Pertwee's first - this delightful tale where plastic objects suddenly spring to life. Just my luck to start watching in time for one of the scariest scenes ever, the one where plastic dummies burst out of shop windows and shoot innocent passing members of the public. One minute people were going about their everyday shopping, the next they were gunned down by lumbering mannequins with firearms concealed within their drop-down wrists. How was a five year old supposed to face shopping in the local high street after that?
Still, at least my local high street wasn't Ealing Broadway where these particular scenes were filmed. I paid my very first visit to Ealing last Saturday afternoon in an attempt to lay my childhood demons to rest. The shop I came to see was John Sanders, a traditional department store from the era before bland corporate retailing. No stranger to disaster, the building had survived a direct hit from a V1 bomb during World War Two 25 years before its glass was again shattered during the Auton Invasion of 1970. But John Sanders couldn't hold out as an independent retailer forever and so its mythical shop window now belongs to Marks and Spencer instead. And there are still dummies in it.
Looks evil, doesn't she? She's one of the three mannequins still keeping watch over the unsuspecting people of Ealing Broadway, staring through faceless eyes out across the pelican crossing towards Christ The Saviour church. Three more dummies lurk just inside the M&S entrance, bedecked in red 'sale' t-shirts, awaiting the signal that will snap them back to life. Because, haven't you heard, the Autons are invading again, tonight at 7pm. This time it's Oxford Street that's going to be attacked, but don't worry because a new Doctor will be on hand to save the day (and to lure one of the shop assistants off to a new life). I'm delighted not just that the show is returning but that script writer RussellTDavies has chosen to relaunch the new series using my very first Doctor Who nightmares. And I really hope that, next Saturday, there'll be small five year old boys walking down Ealing Broadway keeping an especially tight hold on their parent's hand, just in case that nearby shop window shatters and the invasion begins for real.
The very last Doctor Who episode was set in London, just like the very first. It wasn't meant to be the very last episode, it just turned out that way when the Doctor finally met his match in the form of evil programme controller Michael Grade. Had the production team known that this was the end of the line, I suspect they'd have wrapped up the show somewhere slightly more glamorous than the streets of Perivale. But I guess it was kind of appropriate to end somewhere suburban, somewhere ordinary, somewhere London.
Perivale is very London. John Betjeman described the place as a "parish of enormous hayfields", but you'd be hard pushed to agree with him today. Now it's a patch of 1930s semis built alongside the A40, just west of the Hanger Lane gyratory system. Perivale's most famous landmark is probably the Art Deco HooverBuilding, a Grade 1 listed white structure now sympathetically converted to a Tesco hypermarket. It's even lit up emerald green at night, just to show how much loved it is. But that's about as thrilling as Perivale gets. There is the Grand Union Canal, and the Central line and a huge Royal Mail sorting office, and even a very big hill (of which more later). But Perivale is mostly houses.
This is the house on the corner of Bleasdale Avenue and Colwyn Avenue, outside which the Tardis materialised at the start of the final Doctor Who story. We're on the Medway estate, a well-kept network of mock tudor semis and desirable council housing complete with spring blossom and multi-car ownership. In the TV series these leafy avenues were supposed to be where Ace grew up, popping down to the shops on Medway Parade and hanging out in the recreation ground opposite the station. Here the feline Cheetah People struck, carting off the local adolescents to hunt as prey on their distant homeworld. I watched as a silent milkfloat hummed by, and shuddered slightly as a small cat stopped to look at me from the pavement. All wonderfully ordinary, just like the streets where I grew up, and so typical of Doctor Who to place the terrifying slap bang in the middle of the mundane.
The final scenes of the final show were shot atop Perivale's highest point, the summit of Horsenden Hill. It's a beautiful wooded peak of green contours, rising unspoilt above the surrounding housing estates. I climbed the wooded path from the hump-back bridge by the canal, arriving halfway up in a grassy clearing populated by shifty-looking semi-clad blokes. At the summit four boys were kicking a football around while their mothers sat patiently waiting for them to run out of steam. I stood for a while to take in the fantastic views over West London, including the new Wembley arch rising to the east. I liked the place rather more than I thought I was going to, but I'm still glad that by 7pm tomorrow evening this attractive hilltop will no longer be the site of the final Doctor Who episode.
"There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, and the sea's asleep, and the rivers dream. People made of smoke and cities made of song. Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice, somewhere else the tea's getting cold. Come on Ace, we've got work to do."
The very first Doctor Who episode was set in London, supposedly somewhere around Shoreditch, which just goes to show how before-its-time the show was even then. The show opened with an atmospheric shot of a dimly-lit junkyard. What was that mysterious looking police box doing there in Totters Lane, and why was it humming? The scene then switched to a nearby secondary school where we were introduced to the Doctor's granddaughter, Susan, and to her teachers Ian and Barbara. Two key Doctor Who locations... or they would have been if only the first episode hadn't been filmed entirely in the studio. There is no such London street as Totters Lane, let alone a Foreman's junkyard at number 76, neither is there a Coal Hill School anywhere in the Ofsted database. But I still managed to find them both, within a mile of each other in west London, thanks to two stories that revisited these locations more than 20 years later.
76 Totters Lane
The Doctor returned to Foreman's junkyard in 1985, as part of the two-part story Attack of the Cybermen (UK Gold, Saturday, 3:10pm). Colin Baker and assistant Peri parked the Tardis here before setting off to tackle a gang of diamond thieves in the London sewers, like you do. The junkyard scene was only brief, but it provided a geographical location for the original 1963 series, and nowhere near Shoreditch. This is Becklow Road in Acton, London W12, at the crossroads with Cobbold Road and Gayford Road. It's a quiet residential backwater surrounded by old Victorian terraces. All old, that is, except for the one glaringly new block of flats you can see in my photo. Closer inspection confirms that these redbrick apartments have been built (at some time during the last 20 years) on the precise site where the filming of 76 Totters Lane took place. Residents do normal things here now, oblivious of the site's former history, things like watching television, doing the hoovering and not running away from Cybermen. The old junkyard has vanished forever... unless you've got a time machine, of course.
Coal Hill School
This old school building, by contrast, looks just the same as it did when Sylvester McCoy screeched to a halt outside in the search for renegade Daleks. It's a big old Victorian school building, just off the main shopping street in Hammersmith, with separate entrances for "Boys", "Girls" and "Infants". In 1988 this was the home of St John's School, dressed up for the series as Coal Hill School (1963). The headteacher was the actor who played Mr Bronson, the playground had alien scorchmarks on the tarmac and, most importantly of all, this was the place where Daleks first demonstated they could travel up stairs. But in 2005 there's no school here any more. The northern half of the building is now the Macbeth Centre, the local Adult Education base where you can do courses in feng shui, pilates, welding and web design (but not time travel). And the southern half of the building is now a key stage 4 pupil referral unit for excluded pupils. Exactly the sort of place where troublesome Ace might have ended up... as indeed she did, smashing the chemistry lab to smithereens with her baseball bat before the whole room exploded. Evidence suggests that today's troubled teenagers are rather more well behaved.
I don't know whether you've noticed, but DoctorWho is back on our TV screens this Saturday after a 16-year hiatus. The return of this sci-fi classic will either fill you with nostalgic childlike joy, or leave you reaching for the remote in total indifference. For the next few days, I'm hoping it's the former.
With the entire infinite universe at his disposal, the Doctor instead chose to spend an inordinate amount of his time on just one small blue-green planet - our own Earth. Careful scrutiny of videotape records narrows down his particular interest to protecting the UK from imminent alien invasion and, more specifically, in safeguarding residents living within five miles of BBC Television Centre. A surprisingly high proportion of the Doctor's adventures took place in the capital and, as if to make the point, the first episode of the newseries is set here too (somewhere on the number 16 bus route). OK, so the latest stuff was actually filmed in Cardiff with the help of a few hijacked Routemasters, but many of the old stories really were shot in London, just for added realism. I spent last Saturday visiting a handful of these choice locations, just to see what's left after Who's gone. First location report tomorrow.
In the meantime, courtesy of this splendid (but now defunct) website, here's a rundown of Doctor Who's London film locations.
William Hartnell (1963-66)
• The Dalek Invasion of Earth(filmed August 1964): Classic shots of Daleks in Trafalgar Square, rolling along the Embankment and perching on top of the Albert Memorial (how did they get up the steps?)
• The Massacre(filmed January 1966): New companion Dodo runs inside what she thinks is a police box, near the windmill on Wimbledon Common.
• The War Machines(filmed May 1966): The Doctor discovers that the new Post Office Tower is in fact the base of an evil computer bent on taking over the world.
Patrick Troughton (1966-69)
• The Invasion(filmed September 1968): Cybermen crawl out of the sewers and invade the capital (including that iconic shot of silver-suited robots walking down the steps in front of St Paul's Cathedral.
Jon Pertwee (1970-74)
• Spearhead From Space(filmed September 1969): Shop window dummies spring to life in Ealing High Street.
• The Terror of the Autons(filmed September 1970): The Master's first appearance, in a circus tent on land now covered by the Lea Bridge Ice Centre, Leyton.
• The Mind of Evil(filmed November 1970): Exterior shots of UNIT headquarters are shot in Cornwall Gardens, South Kensington.
• Day of the Daleks(filmed September 1971): Ogrons emerge from a time tunnel underneath Bull's Bridge, Hayes, Middlesex.
• Invasion of the Dinosaurs(filmed 1973): The Doctor parks his Whomobile outside a deserted Moorgate station, only to be hemmed in by a stegosaurus.
Tom Baker (1974-81)
• Terror of the Zygons(filmed March 1975): The Loch Ness Monster emerges from the River Thames beside Lambeth Bridge, beneath Millbank Tower.
• The Talons of Weng-Chiang(filmed December 1976): Seminal Victorian East London fogbound mystery adventure, featuring Clink Street, St Katherine's Dock and Wapping Old Stairs.
• Logopolis(filmed December 1980): The Tardis materialises on Cadogan Pier beneath Albert Bridge, where The Watcher is standing guard.
Peter Davison (1981-84)
• Mawdryn Undead(filmed August 1982): The Brigadier has become a maths teacher at a minor public school, located in Trent Park, Enfield (just north of Cockfosters station).
• Resurrection of the Daleks(filmed September 1983): The deserted warehouses to the east of Tower Bridge turn out to be full of Daleks (and not yet trendy restaurants).
Colin Baker (1984-86)
• Attack of the Cybermen(filmed May 1984): Those evil silver creatures swarm all over some obscure backstreets across Acton, including a certain junkyard that turns out to be where the series began.
Sylvester McCoy (1987-89)
• Remembrance of the Daleks(filmed April 1988): The Doctor goes back to school (off Hammersmith High Street) and uncovers the Hand of Omega in a grave in a cemetery in Kilburn (the same one where my great-grandfather is buried).
• Survival(filmed June 1989): The final story of the final series sees Cheetah People invading a sleepy Perivale estate.
Who's London
The first Doctor Who story I ever remember watching was Jon Pertwee's first - this delightful tale where plastic objects suddenly spring to life. Just my luck to start watching in time for one of the scariest scenes ever, the one where plastic dummies burst out of shop windows and shoot innocent passing members of the public. One minute people were going about their everyday shopping, the next they were gunned down by lumbering mannequins with firearms concealed within their drop-down wrists. How was a five year old supposed to face shopping in the local high street after that?
Still, at least my local high street wasn't Ealing Broadway where these particular scenes were filmed. I paid my very first visit to Ealing last Saturday afternoon in an attempt to lay my childhood demons to rest. The shop I came to see was John Sanders, a traditional department store from the era before bland corporate retailing. No stranger to disaster, the building had survived a direct hit from a V1 bomb during World War Two 25 years before its glass was again shattered during the Auton Invasion of 1970. But John Sanders couldn't hold out as an independent retailer forever and so its mythical shop window now belongs to Marks and Spencer instead. And there are still dummies in it.
Looks evil, doesn't she? She's one of the three mannequins still keeping watch over the unsuspecting people of Ealing Broadway, staring through faceless eyes out across the pelican crossing towards Christ The Saviour church. Three more dummies lurk just inside the M&S entrance, bedecked in red 'sale' t-shirts, awaiting the signal that will snap them back to life. Because, haven't you heard, the Autons are invading again, tonight at 7pm. This time it's Oxford Street that's going to be attacked, but don't worry because a new Doctor will be on hand to save the day (and to lure one of the shop assistants off to a new life). I'm delighted not just that the show is returning but that script writer Russell T Davies has chosen to relaunch the new series using my very first Doctor Who nightmares. And I really hope that, next Saturday, there'll be small five year old boys walking down Ealing Broadway keeping an especially tight hold on their parent's hand, just in case that nearby shop window shatters and the invasion begins for real.
Perivale is very London. John Betjeman described the place as a "parish of enormous hayfields", but you'd be hard pushed to agree with him today. Now it's a patch of 1930s semis built alongside the A40, just west of the Hanger Lane gyratory system. Perivale's most famous landmark is probably the Art Deco Hoover Building, a Grade 1 listed white structure now sympathetically converted to a Tesco hypermarket. It's even lit up emerald green at night, just to show how much loved it is. But that's about as thrilling as Perivale gets. There is the Grand Union Canal, and the Central line and a huge Royal Mail sorting office, and even a very big hill (of which more later). But Perivale is mostly houses.
This is the house on the corner of Bleasdale Avenue and Colwyn Avenue, outside which the Tardis materialised at the start of the final Doctor Who story. We're on the Medway estate, a well-kept network of mock tudor semis and desirable council housing complete with spring blossom and multi-car ownership. In the TV series these leafy avenues were supposed to be where Ace grew up, popping down to the shops on Medway Parade and hanging out in the recreation ground opposite the station. Here the feline Cheetah People struck, carting off the local adolescents to hunt as prey on their distant homeworld. I watched as a silent milkfloat hummed by, and shuddered slightly as a small cat stopped to look at me from the pavement. All wonderfully ordinary, just like the streets where I grew up, and so typical of Doctor Who to place the terrifying slap bang in the middle of the mundane.
76 Totters Lane
Coal Hill School
William Hartnell (1963-66)
Patrick Troughton (1966-69)
Jon Pertwee (1970-74)
Tom Baker (1974-81)
Peter Davison (1981-84)
Colin Baker (1984-86)
Sylvester McCoy (1987-89)
