Gainsborough Pictures was a film studio based in Poole Street, Hoxton in the London Borough of Hackney, active between 1924 and 1951. Built as a power station for the Metropolitan Railway, and later converted to studios, the former studios were demolished in 2002 and apartments built on the site in 2004. A London Borough of Hackney historical plaque is attached to the building^[1] A film studio is a controlled environment for the making of a film. ... Hoxton Square. ... Hackney Town Hall was built in the 1930s for the old Metropolitan Borough. ... The Metropolitan Line is a line of the London Underground. ...

Gainsborough was founded in 1924 by Michael Balcon and was a sister company to the Gaumont-British Picture Corporation 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' films, Gainsborough mainly produced 'B' movies and melodramas. 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 the study making multilingual films before the war. In the 1930s Conrad Veidt, Mutz Greenbaum, Alfred Junge, Elizabeth Bergner and Berthold Viertel, along with others, joined the two studios. Sir Michael Balcon (19 May 1896–17 October 1977) was a British film producer, best known for his work with the Ealing Studios. ... Gaumont is a French film production company and is the worlds oldest film company. ... Lime Grove Studios was a film studio complex built by the Gaumont Film Company in 1915 situated in a street named Lime Grove, near Hammersmith, west London and described by Gaumont as the finest studio in Great Britain and the first building ever put up in this country solely for... Shepherds Bush is a district of West London in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, situated 4. ... Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE (August 13, 1899 – April 29, 1980) was a highly influential film director and producer who pioneered many techniques in the suspense and thriller genres. ... UFA logo Universum Film AG, better known as Ufa or UFA, was the principal film studio in Germany, home of the German film industry during the Weimar Republic and through World War II, and a major force in world cinema during its brief existence from 1917 to 1945. ... Conrad Veidt in The Spy in Black (1939). ... Mutz Greenbaum (February 3, 1896 – July 1968), sometimes credited as Max Greene or Max Greenbaum was a Berlin, Germany-born film cinematographer. ... German-born production designer Alfred Junge (1886 - 1964) had wanted to be an artist from childhood. ... Elisabeth Bergner, 1935 Elisabeth Bergner was born Elisabeth Ettel on August 22, 1897, in Drohobycz, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Drogobych, Ukraine). ... Berthold Viertel (born June 28, 1885 in Vienna, Austria) was screen writer and director. ...

After the departure of Balcon to the British arm of MGM, the Rank Organisation took an interest in Gainsborough and popular films such as Oh, Mr Porter! (1937) were made. From 1942 to 1946 a series of morally ambivalent costume melodramas were produced by Gainsborough for the domestic market mostly based on recent popular books by female novelists. These included The Man in Grey (1943), Madonna of the Seven Moons (1944), Fanny by Gaslight (1944), The Wicked Lady (1945) and Caravan (1946) based around a stable of British actors including Margaret Lockwood, James Mason, Stewart Granger and Patricia Roc. The studio also made modern-dress comedies and melodramas such as Love Story (1944), Time Flies (starring Tommy Handley, 1944), Bees in Paradise (with Arthur Askey directed by Val Guest, 1944), They Were Sisters (1945), and Easy Money (1948). MGM logo Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or MGM, is a large media company, involved primarily in the production and distribution of cinema and television programs. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Oh, Mr Porter! (with minor variations in punctuation) can refer both to a song and a film inspired by the song. ... Poster for The Perils of Pauline (1914). ... A novel (from French nouvelle Italian novella, new) is an extended, generally fictional narrative, typically in prose. ... Video Cover The Man in Grey is a 1943 English film melodrama made by Gainsborough Pictures and distributed by Universal Pictures (1945). ... 1943 (MCMXLIII) was a common year starting on Friday (the link is to a full 1943 calendar). ... The Wicked Lady was a 1945 film starring Margaret Lockwood in the title role as a woman marrying into nobility (Barbara Worth aka Lady Barbara Skelton) who turns to highway robbery for enjoyment, and to repay gambling debts. ... Margaret Lockwood with Michael Redgrave in The Lady Vanishes (1938) Margaret Lockwood, CBE (15 September 1916 - 15 July 1990) was a British actress. ... James Neville Mason (May 15, 1909 – July 27, 1984) was a three-time Academy Award nominated English actor who attained stardom in both British and American films. ... Stewart Granger (May 6, 1913 – August 16, 1993) was an English film actor, mainly associated with heroic and romantic leading roles. ... Time Flies is the third studio album by Vaya Con Dios. ... Tommy (Thomas Reginald) Handley (1892 -1949) was a British comedian mainly known for the BBC radio program ITMA (Its That Man Again). He was born at Toxteth Park, (Liverpool) on 17 January 1892 and died on 9 January 1949 from a brain hemorrhage. ... Arthur Askey (June 6, 1900 - November 16, 1982) was a prominent British comedian. ... Val Guest signing autographs. ... Easy Money, a satirical 1948 British film about one of the most beloved traditions of the English middle class, the football pool, is comprised of a quartet of tales about the effect a major win has on four different groups in the postwar period. ...

Subsequent productions, led by Betty Box (who at the time was the only major female producer in British cinema), included Miranda (1948) and the Huggett family series with Jack Warner, Kathleen Harrison, and Petula Clark. Unhappy with the performance of the studio, Rank closed closed it in early 1951. Betty (Evelyn) Box (25 September 1915 - 15 January 1999) was a British film producer and sister of Sydney Box. ... Miranda is British comedy/fantasy film, made in 1948. ... Promotional poster Here Come the Huggetts is a 1948 film, the first of a trio about a working class English family. ... Jack Warner (October 24, 1896 – May 24, 1981) was a popular British film and television actor. ... Kathleen Harrison (February 23, 1892, Blackburn, Lancashire, England - December 7, 1995, was a prolific British character actress, best remembered for her roles as Mrs Huggett in a series of British post-war comedies (playing opposite Jack Warner). ... Petula Clark, CBE (born November 15, 1932), is a British singer, actress and composer of Welsh and English parentage, best known for her upbeat popular international hits of the 1960s. ...

The Lime Grove site was taken over by the BBC in 1949 and used for TV current affairs and other programmes until it closed in 1991. The buildings were demolished in the early '90s, and replaced with housing called Gaumont Terrace and Gainsborough Court. - false. the waterside housing complex is still known as Gainsborough studios with the four blocks bounding the court in the middle going by the names of East, West, North and South studios. An upmarket development, prices start at around £250,000. The British Broadcasting Corporation, usually known as the BBC (and also informally known as the Beeb or Auntie) is the largest broadcasting corporation in the world in terms of audience numbers, employing 26,000 staff in the United Kingdom alone and with a budget of more than GB£4 billion...

References and notes

Bibliography

• Cook, Pam (ed), Gainsborough Pictures (1997);
• Harper, Sue, Picturing the Past: the Rise and Fall of the British Costume Film (1994);
• Harper, Sue, Women in British Cinema (2000).

External links

• Gainsborough Pictures at the BFI's Screenonline