You’d think recreating swinging London circa 1966 would be easy. Think again. Director Adrian Shergold discovered a lot has changed in 40 years.
He explains: “One of the hardest things was not so much shooting in 1985 or even in the 1970s but shooting Soho 1966. That proved the most problematic era because there is very little of 60s London left.
“We did actually think about using bits of Soho but all those old streets have changed beyond recognition now. When you look at black and white footage of that part of London in the 60s, there is no-one sitting outside cafés, there is no café society at all.
“The whole world seemed much grubbier and scuffy then. It had a slightly 50s feel to it actually, so in order to try and re-create that, we had to go and find some streets we could make look like 50s / 60s London. We found those in Spitalfields (central London) which we dressed and made our very own Soho in the 60s.
“We also had to film in and around Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square. Obviously we couldn’t just cordon them off so we were filming guerrilla style,” he laughs.
“Piccadilly used to be a big roundabout with Eros right in the middle of it. But that has all been pedestrianised now. We managed to make it feel like it was still a Circus by using our background artists on the night. We persuaded all the tourists to shift off Eros so we could actually clamber on it and over it.
“I was surprised at how well it worked because I remember shooting in Soho years ago and it was a nightmare. People kept on having to wave at the camera or just do something stupid to mess up the shot.
But people on this were brilliant. And again, filming in Trafalgar Square was tricky because we were filming a 360-degree shot and we had double decker buses and modern cars to worry about in the background.
“We got away with it by packing one of our characters into a phone box and then tracking the camera very tightly around it.”
An untouched passage in Spitalfields in the city of London doubles for swinging Soho. Original sites are rare
Most of the original 60s London has been erased by city planners and builders, says the director
Gutter press. Newspaper reporter Tony walks the mean, and grubby, streets of shame
The glamorous London of the 60s was really a worn out version of 50s London, says Adrian Shergold
