Quadrophenia film locations
Film locations: London; East Sussex
Quadrophenia location: Chasing the Greaser: Shepherds Bush Market, Goldhawk Road, London W12
The Who’s album is used as a framework for teen angst and a recreation of the early Sixties weekend battles between supersharp Mods and leatherclad Rockers.
The Who hailed originally from Shepherd’s Bush in west London, and this is where most of the London scenes are set. Fiercely Mod Jimmy (Phil Daniels) rides his scooter along Goldhawk Road to meet Steph (Leslie Ash) at Ashken’s supermarket, which once stood between Bamborough Gardens and Woodger Road.
Quadrophenia location: the pie’n’mash shop: Cooke’s, 48 Goldhawk Road, London W12
On the other side of the road, another Quadrophenia location, though, is still thriving. Forget fish and chips, the real old London tradition, now hard to find, is pie and mash – beef pie, mashed potato and parsley liquor. If you’re brave, and you can find them, you could try eels, too. The pie and mash shop where Jimmy and greaser pal Kevin (Ray Winstone) eat after meeting up in the bath-house is Cooke’s, 48 Goldhawk Road, alongside the entrance to Shepherd’s Bush Market. This narrow, bustling alley of stalls, running alongside the railway between Goldhawk Road Station and Shepherd’s Bush Station, is the benighted passage along which Kevin is chased from Goldhawk Road tube station and beaten up by Mods.
Quadrophenia location: Jimmy’s house: Wells House Road, Willesden, London NW10
Jimmy’s home was north of Shepherd's Bush, at 115 Wells House Road, backing onto the railway line between Willesden Junction and Acton Central, near Old Oak Common.
Quadrophenia location: the party house on ‘Kitchener Road’: Clarendon Gardens, Wembley
Northwest of London, in Wembley, 54 Clarendon Gardens at Castleton Avenue is the house on ‘Kitchener Road’ where Jimmy and the Mods crash the party
The Rockers attack Spider after his scooter breaks down outside the Bramley Arms, Notting Hill, a pub seen in movies such as classic Ealing comedy The Lavender Hill Mob, with Alec Guinness, the Harold Pinter reverse-timescale drama Betrayal, John Boorman’s offbeat Leo the Last and Alex Cox’s Sid And Nancy. Opposite the Bramley is the scrapyard where Pete works.
During the Seventies, much of the area was squatted and, in a gesture inspired by Ealing’s Passport to Pimlico, seceded from the UK. When threatened with eviction, residents appealed to the UN. The Quadrophenia film crew needed to get ‘passports’ for the ‘Kingdom of Frestonia’ in order to film there.
Quadrophenia location: The Mods’ London hangout: S&M Cafe, Islington, London N1
The London hangout of the Mods is the S&M Cafe, 4-6 Essex Road, Islington, just north of the Angel tube station. This art deco institution, dating from the twenties is more famous under its former name, Alfredo’s. It also appeared as ‘Luigi’s’ coffee bar in 1997’s Fifties-set music biz drama Mojo.
It’s while using the, now closed, public baths of Porchester Hall, Porchester Centre, Queensway, that old pals Jimmy and Kevin meet up, only to realise that they’ve fallen on opposite sides of the Mod-Rocker divide when they come to get dressed. The complex also contains a Turkish bath which is still functioning. Incidentally, the baths were originally intended to be the setting for the vicious knife fight in David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises – though practical problems meant that the scene was eventually shot on a studio set.
North of Highgate, on North Hill, N6, stands the Wellington Service Station. This unremarkable little service station stands on the site of the old Wellington pub, the boozer in which Jimmy and his Mod pals buy dud pills from the hard men.
At weekends, the rival tribes fled south from London to the Coast Mods on their scooters, Rockers on motorbikes. In the faded seaside town of Brighton, the rival gangs congregate by the Palace Pier, in front of the now-closed Heart and Hand – then one of Brighton’s most famous gay bars. The marquee of the cinema next door is advertising Heaven Can Wait – the Warren Beatty movie released in (whoops) 1978.
Quadrophenia location: The riot spills into town: East Street, Brighton
East along the seafront, the Mods meet for breakfast at the Waterfront Cafe at the Peter Pan Play Area, Madeira Drive. Opposite the pier entrance you can see the exterior of the ballroom in which the Mods enjoy a raucous evening, is now the Brighton Sealife Centre.
So if you're going to Brighton to check out the interior, you're in for a disappointment. The dance hall, where Jimmy upstages Ace (Sting) by leaping from the balcony, is in Southgate, north London. It used to be the Royalty Ballroom, bit is now The LA Fitness, Winchmore Hill Road, at the end of Dennis Parade opposite Southgate tube station.
Quadrophenia location: The dance hall exterior: Sea Life Centre, Brighton
Back in Brighton, the riot spreads from the seafront into the town. Just across Old Steine is East Street, where the rioters get hemmed in by the law and Jimmy finally manages a quickie with Steph in the narrow alley by number 11, leading to Little East Street.
Quadrophenia location: Jimmy and Steph enjoy a quickie: alley by 11 East Street, Brighton
Back in London, in the streets north of Uxbridge Road, Shepherd’s Bush, is the Wormholt Estate where, on Gravesend Road at Sawley Road, Jimmy’s scooter gets “killed” in a collision with a post office van.
With his beloved scooter is trashed, Jimmy catches the train to Brighton from Paddington Station – though no trains run to the south coast from here (Brighton trains leave from Victoria).
The hotel, where Jimmy is ultimately disillusioned by the sight of Ace working as a bellboy is, of course, the five-star De Vere Grand, King’s Road, dominating the town’s seafront.
Quadrophenia location: ‘Bellboy’: The De Vere Grand, Brighton
The spectacular white cliffs, from which Jimmy ultimately takes a dive on Ace’s jazzed-up scooter, are almost twenty miles east of Brighton, at Beachy Head, southwest of Eastbourne.
All material Copyright ©2008 The Worldwide Guide To Movie Locations
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Quadrophenia, 1979
Director
Cast
visit the film locations
London: Flights: Heathrow Airport; Gatwick Airport
S&M Cafe, 4-6 Essex Road, Islington, N1 (tel: 020.7359.5361) (tube: Angel, Northern Line)
Brighton: rail from London Victoria
De Vere Grand, King's Road, Brighton (tel: 01273.224300)
Trivia
Brighton on screen has traditionally had a seedy reputation. In the 1947 screen version of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, Richard Attenborough is surprisingly menacing as a baby-faced teenage hoodlum in a world of sleazy smalltime gangsters. The town’s shabby gentility was exploited by opening up Joe Orton’s housebound black farce Loot.
Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa ends in Brighton, with a confrontation on the Palace Pier, while Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore enjoy a furtive weekend in the same director’s adaptation of another Graham Greene novel, The End of the Affair.
And, of course, where else would the Carry On... team enjoy their constant pursuit of nookey in Carry On Girls and Carry On at Your Convenience – even if it masquerades as Fircombe-on-Sea.