Gainsborough Studios, Building, Hackney Housing, East London Property Images, Architect

Gainsborough Studios, London

Shoreditch Properties: Residential Architecture design by Munkenbeck + Marshall Architects

12 Sep 2010

Gainsborough Studios

Dates built: 2001-02

Architect: Munkenbeck + Marshall Architects

Photographs © Adrian Welch Sep 2010:

Gainsborough Studios – apartments, Hackney, East London, England

Typology: Mixed Use Development

Building construction cost: £34m, approximate

Client: Lincoln Holdings plc

Program: mixed use project – 280 new build apartments + restaurant ; refurbishment of old film studio

Affordable housing client: Southern Housing Corporation

Munkenbeck + Marshall

Location: Poole Street, Shoreditch, London, England, UK

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Gainsborough Studios History

Gainsborough Pictures was a British film studio based on the south bank of the Regent’s Canal, in Poole Street, Hoxton in the former Metropolitan Borough of Shoreditch, London. Gainsborough Studios were active between 1924 and 1951.

Built as a power station for the Great Northern & City Railway it was later converted to studios. The former studios were demolished in 2002 and flats built on the site in 2004. A London Borough of Hackney historical plaque is attached to the building. The studio is best remembered for the Gainsborough melodramas it produced in the 1940s.

Gainsborough was founded in 1924 by Michael Balcon and was a sister company to the Gaumont British 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’ pictures, Gainsborough mainly produced ‘B’ movies and melodramas at its Islington Studios.

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, actors Elisabeth Bergner and Conrad Veidt, art director Alfred Junge, cinematographer Mutz Greenbaum and screenwriter/director Berthold Viertel, along with others, joined the two studios.
Source: wikipedia