Gabion: Cinema history comes to life: the renaissance of Ealing Studios. 1/4

We know, or we think we know, what Hollywood is like. We have an idea of India’s Bollywood, too, and both the French and Italian film industries have clear identities. But Britain? Not since the post-war heyday of the Ealing Studios, people will tell you, have we had an identifiable centre of the film business. Those days are gone.

The curious thing is that Ealing Studios still exist. Films and TV series - everything from Notting Hill to the Royle Family - are still made there. But you wouldn’t really know it, any more than you have a very clear idea of what’s going on in the big production sheds at Pinewood or Shepperton or Elstree, beyond a vague idea that it must be the next Bond movie. But that’s set to change. Ealing Studios are in new hands. This year, 2002, marks their centenary, and they are about to spend up to £50m on their biggest revamp since the 1930s.

The studios arrived in Ealing in 1902 when silent film pioneer Will Barker bought two houses on Ealing Green, one of which had a usefully large garden. Despite later expansion, everything stayed very domestic. The main house is still there. So is some of the garden. Behind that, you get a curious agglomeration of recently-listed white-painted buildings, tightly jammed in on a site of less than four acres, which include some sound stages dating from the 1920s and 1930s when Ealing converted to the talkies under the direction of Basil Dean. He was succeeded in 1938 by Michael Balcon, the man who was to preside over Ealing’s most creatively successful period. Balcon turned out everything from stiff-upper-lip wartime yarns such as The Cruel Sea to comedy classics such as the Lavender Hill Mob, until the studios were finally sold to the BBC in 1955.