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With
household names like Peter
Sellers, Spike Milligan, Arthur
Askey and James Mason, you need
not be a film buff to appreciate
the faded glamour of the film
studios that, in its heyday,
hosted them all.
An impressive array of talent appeared
at the Merton Park Studios, at Long Lodge
in
Kingston Road, a creative hub short on
space but not ambition.
About 130 second feature films or Bmovies,
mostly crime-based, were made at
the studios, with production reaching its
peak in the early 1960s.
Part of Long Lodge, where the studios
were based, was leased to Publicity Films
in 1934
with the rest of the premises occupied
by the Brocklesby family.
In 1939, the family left and the whole
building was taken over by Merton Park
Studios and its associated companies.
During the war, training and propaganda
films were made, giving way to information,
education
and
advertising
afterwards.
Later features such as the Edgar Wallace
mysteries, the Scotland Yard series and its
successor Scales of Justice, hosted by
Edgar Lustgarten, were successful despite
their tight budget.
The actors used often went on to fame, if
not better paid work, elsewhere.
A young Stanley Baker graced Merton
Park before he moved on to The Guns of
Navarone and Zulu.
Among other later greats you might
have spotted if you had hung around the
front gate with your autograph book was
a young scriptwriter called Michael Winner,
in the days before he found fame as a
director with the Death Wish series and
Esure adverts.
A prudent approach to film-making
meant that parts of the borough were
often
used as sites for location filming.
Thought perfectly suited for police car
chases was the section of London Road in
Morden underneath the bridge near Morden South station, as can be witnessed
in
1962's Never Back Losers.
The number of films made annually fell
from 13
in 1961 to just one, the last made, in 1967, which was Payment in Kind,
starring John Thaw.
The studio closed and the operation decamped
to Bushey, Hertfordshire,
but the
film library remained until 1976 when
Long Lodge was sold and the grounds developed
for housing with the house becoming
a set of offices, now home to
Bedford Insurance.
However, its past as Hollywood's little
British cousin is commemorated by
plaques from the British Film Institute
and Merton Council, the latter also noting
its earlier history as the home and workshop
of pre-Raphaelite artist Frederic
Shields, a friend of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Supplied by
Phyllis Marum
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