Gary Oldman’s London: how the city has changed since Nil by Mouth

Cinema in the 1990s had an unusual relationship to London. On the one hand, it became a picture-postcard fantasy, with quaint streets and cloyingly polite lives dominating the screen. On the other hand, a number of films provided a tonic to this saccharine vision, showing the darker side of the capital, in some of the most hopeless, painful and resilient portrayals of the city ever put on screen.

In films such as Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993), Antonia Bird’s Face (1997) and Michael Winterbottom’s Wonderland (1999), London became a night-time city, sodium-lit by streetlights and littered with loneliness and violence. Among the most remarkable of these films came from actor Gary Oldman in his raw and unflinching directorial debut, Nil by Mouth.

Building on his own background and experiences of growing up in working-class south-east London, Nil by Mouth follows a family living on a council estate and how their lives intertwine, sometimes violently. Valerie (Kathy Burke) lives with Raymond (Ray Winston), an alcoholic pressure-cooker of a man ready to explode at any moment. Valerie’s brother Billy (Charles Creed-Miles) is a drug user whose addiction is spiralling out of control, while Billy and Valerie’s mother Janet (Laila Morse, Oldman’s real-life older sister) tries to contain the growing frictions within the family, albeit unsuccessfully.

Nil by Mouth is a tough watch, its drama tackling themes including domestic abuse. Its sense of authenticity is rooted in the painfully honest aspect of autobiography in Oldman’s script, but also in his choice of locations. In many ways, Nil by Mouth is a social document of the last gasps of working-class London, its spaces and its architecture before the new millennium saw demolition and gentrification. Here are five key locations from the film as they stand today.

For a lads’ night out, Oldman takes his characters to Soho and a variety of strip clubs and slot machine venues. It’s an incredibly closed view of the area because Oldman films mainly in closeups, but fragments of it are unmistakable. The first example is the advertising screens at Piccadilly Circus, which – though now more technologically advanced – remain today.

Although the clubs the men visit are difficult to identify (especially because so many have now closed), one is recognisable: the famous Las Vegas slot machine club in Wardour Street. We see a closeup of the sign first.

There are several shots on the inside as the men play a number of games, before we see them leave, a shot of the exterior showing them as they head on to more salacious pleasures. 

The underground plays a small role in the film when the story shifts emphasis to the character of Billy. He takes refuge on the carriages of the trains as well as wandering and begging around the stations.

There are also several scenes of him begging or waiting to meet people outside of the Northern Line branch of Elephant and Castle station, marked by the ramps heading into the area’s shopping centre. The area has seen huge changes in recent years, with the original exterior of the station changed and the shopping centre demolished.

The exterior of the station, however, is largely unchanged and even the telephone box Billy uses to call is just about still standing.

Nil by Mouth acts as a partial guide to the rough and ready pubs of south London during the 1990s. We see several throughout, sometimes in extended scenes indoors, sometimes glimpsed on walks and through car windows. For example, on one of the film’s many drives through rainy streets, we see The Joiners Arms in Denmark Hill as the boys turn left from Coldharbour Lane, opposite the pub.

The location of the social club where the film opens and later revisits is ambiguous. However, after one key pub scene when Ray forces Valerie to leave with him out of jealousy, we see a shot looking towards New Cross Road, with The Five Bells pub visible. Oldman grew up in a small house just around the corner.

In one of the film’s most tense sequences, we see Ray and his friend Mark (Jamie Foreman) following Valerie to a hospital appointment to check up on the injuries Ray inflicted on her. In this sequence, we see an array of south London streets, all from the perspective of the front driver’s window. One shot shows Courthill Road with the junction of Longbridge Way to the left. The dome of what was the Temperance Billiard Hill, last in use as Rileys Snooker Hall, is still present today, though the venue is boarded up and the dome’s silhouette is masked by the vast luxury flats behind it.

They stop for the lights at the end of Courthill Road with a brief shot of the billiard hall again on the right. The shops to the left are just about standing still, but the buildings on the right hand side have been demolished and mark the beginning of the luxury development.

Several exteriors of the film were shot on the Ferrier Estate in Kidbrooke. The social housing development was built in the late 1960s, with its various blocks, bridges and underpasses quickly falling into disrepair, becoming notorious at the time for crime and social deprivation. The estate underwent regeneration beginning in 2009, which resulted in the wide-scale demolition of the project, completed only in 2021.

Today, many of the shots seen in Nil by Mouth provide a valuable record, as this area has now been entirely replaced, mainly with luxury developments and green space.

A screenshot of an old Google Streetview shows the development just before the demolition began.  

The shot below is in the same spot today, taken on the grassland facing where the estate was on the corner between Weigall Road and Kidbrooke Park Road. 

Only the shot below panning across the estate is really possible to partially recreate, with the grass verge allowing a similar angle on the many new builds and blocks of high-end property. In many regards, this transformation from deprived social housing to luxury space encapsulates the story of London over the last 30 years.

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The BFI National Archive’s 4K remastering of Nil by Mouth is in cinemas nationwide from 4 November and on Blu-ray from 5 December.