The pretend East End of It Always Rains on Sunday, the classic Ealing noir

Director Robert Hamer was one of the most prolific and accomplished directors to rise through the ranks of Ealing Studios. He was famous for both comedies – in particular Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and School for Scoundrels (1960) – and crime films, especially The Long Memory (1953) and The Scapegoat (1959). His greatest crime thriller, however, was undeniably his pitch-black 1947 drama It Always Rains on Sunday.

Based on a novel by Arthur La Bern, Hamer’s drama follows Rose (Googie Withers) and her initially humdrum life in east London. Her marriage to George (Edward Chapman) bores her, while she is constantly at war with George’s two daughters from his previous marriage, Doris (Patricia Plunkett) and Vi (Susan Shaw). Rose’s life is turned upside-down, however, when old flame Tommy (John McCallum) decides to seek refuge in her house after his escape from Dartmoor Prison. With Detective Sgt Fothergill (Jack Warner) on his tail, however, how long will Rose be able to hide her former lover from the law, or resist giving in to her desire for him?

As with many Ealing Studios films, not all the locations used are quite what or where they seem. Despite the East End setting, other parts of London often stand in for the rough and tumble world of post-war Bethnal Green. Even the main street featured in the film is a geographic sleight of hand. So it’s to Hamer’s credit that he weaves such disparate locations together into one cohesive whole, using gritty locations to explore a filmic style that arguably prefigures the later British social realist movement.

Here are five locations from the film as they stand today.

Hamer’s vision of Cockney Bethnal Green is an amalgam of a number of other parts of London. Indeed, the main setting of the film – the street where Rose and George live – is actually Clarence Way in Camden.

A better shot of the actual house occurs later on in the film. This shot marks the property as one of the houses with wooden-fenced gardens.

The filming in Camden continues just up the road with a church which acts as a visual reference throughout the film. Its spire was seen in the earlier shot and is likely one of the factors that determined that the film would be shot in the area; its vaguely Hawksmoor-esque design implying an East End location.

The church is actually the Holy Trinity Church just up the road. We see it more clearly when Tommy is looking for shelter from the rain.

He hides in the church’s doorway, which, aside from being a little more protected by a higher fence, is unchanged.

Further around the corner still, other shots are taken on Hartland Road beyond the railway bridge. This shot shows the junction of Hartland Road and Hawley Road.

Following the two boys who have just blackmailed their way to some new harmonicas, the shot tracks them down the road. The houses seen behind them are far more lavish today.

Not everything in Hamer’s film is an illusion. These are some genuine East End locations, particularly towards the film’s conclusion and its chase sequence. But some glimpses of the East End appear earlier on. The following shots, for example, are used to ground the main street of the film as being near the market on Wentworth Street, Petticoat Lane Market, just off Commercial Street. The angle of the shot is still achievable today thanks to the surviving pub, The Culpeper, seen in the background.

Another shot further down the street gives a better view of the market, taken from the intersection between Wentworth Street and Leyden Street. Again, a small detail gives the location away as being the same: the surviving bollard seen in the lower portion of the shot.

The film’s dramatic finale centres on the police’s pursuit of Tommy across London. A great deal of this is filmed around Whitechapel and eventually Limehouse. The following shots are all taken around Limehouse on Three Colt Street.

This is where Tommy abandons his stolen car and steals a bike instead. The car is first seen driving under the railway bridge on the street.

Tommy then leaves the stolen car on The Mitre before finding the bike to continue his getaway.

In the middle of this very east London chase, Hamer unusually cuts to west London. The following shots are in Acton, no doubt because of the location’s relative proximity to Ealing Studios, where most of the studio segments of the film were shot.

This railway crossing is still present and working today on Bollo Lane. However, Tommy would be hard-pushed in his escape now as the pedestrian bridge he runs over when the gates come down has long since vanished.

One of the very few markers of the location being the same is the small house on the other side of the railway lines. Considering the huge developments all around, even directly opposite, it’s surprising this little building, likely once connected to the railway, still survives.

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