What everyone involved in the business told Burland straight away was that they liked the slightly chaotic nature of the place with its assortment of cheek-by-jowl buildings, its white-painted brick and its rusting pre-war metal windows. But they had to admit that the studios were somewhat primitive and the office space more so. Much later English Heritage, which had conspicuously ignored the complex for years, started to take an interest, which last year led to the listing decision. Burland’s plans successfully leapt this new planning hurdle.

He makes two big moves. The working heart of the studio site consists of the two big original sound stage buildings side by side: facing them across a narrow alley is a factory-like workshop building, where the sets are made for the productions and trundled across. Smaller studio spaces form an outer ring. Burland’s plan, about to swing into action, keeps the big sound stages, links new workshops to them across a wider, glazed street, and then adds a necklace of new production offices around it. The aim is to attract a number of the film-related companies with which London (and especially Soho) teems. They will set up shop on site in brand-new premises, complete with screening rooms. Ealing being out in West London, handy for Heathrow Airport, is a big selling point for the international movie business.

This is a big intervention. There will be a lot of demolition of the lesser buildings. A big L-shaped section of new ones, taking up about half the site in all, will replace them. As well as the new glazed production street running north-south, there will be a new open street of five linked buildings running right along the southern edge of the site, unified by an undulating white-brick façade. The first image Burland show you is his design for the metal-framed windows of the new buildings. “It might seem a minor thing,” he remarks, “but these are vital to maintain the feel of the place.”