Description

TQ18SE EALING GREEN
962/2/10056 Ealing Green
26-JUN-01 (West side)
White House, Ealing Studios

GV II

Former house, now offices. Early C19, much remodelled in c.1931 as the main offices for Ealing Film Studios by Robert Atkinson for Basil Dean and Sir Gerald du Maurier. Brick, rendered white. Two storeys with main rectangular block to front, and long wing to side. Symmetrical faÎade with central pediment and large projecting porch. Metal casement windows. Pedimented gables and bow window to rear. Interior retains 1930s metal staircase and some cornices.

Included for historic interest as the most prominent and well-known building on the Ealing Studios site, the centre of its office activity.

Ealing Film Studios are the most historic surviving film studios in England, both architecturally and for their associations with our film-making history. The first studios were erected here in 1908, Ealing being chosen for having the most smog-free environment close to London. In 1928 legislation demanding a `quota' of British films be shown in cinemas encouraged a revival and reorganisation of the film-making industry, and Basil Dean and Sir Gerald du Maurier in 1929 founded a company, Associated Talking Pictures with an American distributor, the Radio Keith Orpheum Corporation. The partnership of Atkinson and Anderson was brought in to rebuild the site with new studios between 1931 and 1934.

Ealing Studios' greatest importance, however, is for the films shown there. The site enjoyed a successful if unspectacular era under Dean, for it was here that most of Gracie Fields' and George Formby's most popular films were made. The most famous era, however, was that between 1938 and 1958, when Michael Balcon invested the films with a new social vision. His wartime films were notable for their good characterisation and plot, but it was in the post-war period that the sense of social mores truly came out, with `Passport to Pimlico' (1948), `Whisky Galore' (1948), `Kind Hearts and Coronets' (1949), `The Lavender Hill Mob' (1950), `The Titfield Thunderbolt' (1952) and `The Ladykillers' (1955). No other British studio has so strong a history or firm sense of its place as the maker of a distinctively English, indeed London, kind of film.

Sources
Architects' Journal, 16 December 1931
The Builder, 26 February 1932
Ealing Building Control Records, E6119
Paul Spencer-Longhurst, Robert Atkinson, 1989

Kinematograph Weekly, 4 October 1951
Ealing Local History Library, Ealing Studios Scrapbook, various dates
The British Journal of Photography, 30 January 1976, 12 March 1976, and 9 April 1976
Ealing Local History Library, The Story of Ealing Studios, nd
Charles Barr, Ealing Studios, 1977
Rachael Low, The History of the British Film 1929-39, Film Making in 1930s Britain, 1985

External Links

• Historic England Listing
• Wikidata Q26668693

External links are from the relevant listing authority and, where applicable, Wikidata. Wikidata IDs may be related buildings as well as this specific building. If you want to add or update a link, you will need to do so by editing the Wikidata entry.

Recommended Books

• 
  Hampshire: South (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)
• 
  Gwent/Monmouthshire (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of Wales)
• 
  Old House Handbook: A Practical Guide to Care and Repair
• 
  Georgian Style and Design for Contemporary Living
• 
  Yorkshire West Riding: Leeds, Bradford and the North (Pevsner Architectural Guides / Buildings of England)
• 
  London 6: Westminster (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England): Westminster v. 6