Ovington Gardens & Ovington Square
Location of Colonel Blimp's house
Last Sunday (29th April 2001
Neal Lofthouse & I went to see
Peeping Tom (1960) at the NFT. I went up to London earlier
in the day so that I could pay another visit (I've been before)
to Ovington Gardens & Ovington Square. That's where Clive Candy's
house is in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943).
15 Ovington Square.
Some of the filming was done in and around the square, but as the
house was blown up by a bomb in the film & they couldn't do that
to the real house, they did some of it in the studio. Look carefully
next time you watch the film & see if you can spot the difference.
I took quite a few pictures, they all relate to the sequence where
Clive arrives home with Edith. BTW - why is "Edith" driving?
A bit unusual for the 1920's. In fact I don't think I have ever seen
Roger Livesey drive in a film. Could he drive?
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The first photo shows where (in the film) we see the Chelsea Pensioner
(in the red coat) walking along the street.
The camera pans left as Edith and Clive drive along the road.
They're coming from the Brompton Road end of Ovington Gardens.
The image (in the film) blurs a bit as we pan past these houses
but various features can still be clearly identified.
Note the iron railings, they never gave theirs up to the
Spitfire fund as so many people did.
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Notice also the different
balconies and the houses with the pillars & porches. The house
numbers are a bit confusing, you see the Chelsea Pensioner walk
past No 22 & towards us and No 23.
But as the car drives past we see what looks like another No 23 !!
In fact it's that the first houses we see are in
Ovington Gardens and the first house with the pillars is No 1
Ovington Square. What looks like 23 is really No 3 Ovington Square.
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And it's at this point that Ovington Gardens leads into Ovington Square.
The square is rectangular, about 40 yards (metres) by 10 with a small
garden in the middle (where Clive sits at the end of the film). The
garden is fenced & locked (for residents only) but see the last picture
on this page.
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Edith drives up to Clive's house (he inherited it from his Aunt)
ignoring the one-way system round the square as indicated by the big
arrow telling drivers to turn left (that's almost certainly been
made like that only in the last few decades, certainly after 1943).
She appears to park in the middle of the road.
We see a milkman delivering from a handcart and a postman
delivering to one of the houses in the Square
(where that Jeep is parked).
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They park the car in front of Clive's house (the last one before the
ones with the porch supported by pillars) and look up at the house.
Edith points to the top floor thinking that's the den
(where Clive hangs his animal heads) but Clive corrects her
saying it's one floor down. As they look up they see Murdoch hanging
out the Union Flag. Note the roof line, the house to the left juts
out slightly & there's a step in the cornice.
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They walk up to the door and knock (don't they have a key?) for
Murdoch. While he's coming downstairs Edith peeps through the letterbox
to see what awaits her. In the film you can see thin glass panels on
either side of the door, these have now been replaced with wooden
panels. The knocker is different and the letter box has been cleaned
of the paint that was on it when they filmed. But you can see it's
the same house, No 15, Ovington Square, London SW3.
As they wait for Murdoch they swear never to change "until the
floods come and the basement is a lake".
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This final picture is taken from the other side of Ovington square
looking across at No 15. In the final scene when Theo &
Johnny come to console Clive he's sitting on a bench and they take
him back to the house, or rather the bombed out plot where the house
stood. The diamond shape with the letters EWS isn't a compass, it
indicates an Emergency Water Supply. The basement is now a lake so
Clive can change and thus the old Colonel Blimp is dead. Of course
they couldn't knock down the real house so that's all shot in the
studio.
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Other P&P trips
