By James Delingpole

You may never have visited Pinewood Studios but you’ve definitely been there before. To pass through the gates of its 100-acre site in Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire is to experience that same strange sensation - part unsettling, part comforting - that you get in a recurring dream.

The faintly sinister white-painted garden statuary either side of the ornamental bridge by the pond. The grimy industrial passageway. The balcony on the Georgian-style residence looking out onto the conifer-shaded gardens that give the studios their name. Why does it all look so eerily familiar?

And the answer is, of course, that from Black Narcissus and Oliver Twist through The Ipcress File and James Bond to Superman and Harry Potter, Pinewood has been the location for every other great (and not-so-great) film you’ve ever seen.

The bridge? That was the one Truly Scrumptious crossed over in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - and it also led the way into The Secret Garden.

The statues? Unsettling because they evoke horror films like Blood On Satan’s Claw. The industrial passageway? It’s named Goldfinger Avenue because that’s the place where James Bond was dazzled in the mirror by his own headlights and crashed his Aston Martin. The balcony? Take your pick. It has variously appeared as part of Spectre HQ in James Bond films, as the Iranian embassy in Who Dares Wins, as the fire-ravaged mansion in The Amazing Mister Blunden and, most memorably, as the place where Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond holds his embassy dinner under fire in Carry On Up The Khyber.

Oh, and that magnificent cedar you’ve just passed in the grounds will shortly become quite recognisable too. The bare area you can see surrounding it, where the grass is worn, was until recently a snowy village in Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows. And the reason it was filmed in this slightly awkward spot in the gardens rather than on one of the studio back lots is because the director liked the tree.

Enlarge

Plan of the project, showing how the site is divided into cities; streets are designed to offer the best camera angles, and there are slots where camera teams can plug in their equipment

Once you’re out of the garden area - Old Pinewood studios, where it all started in the Thirties - the atmosphere gets a bit less nostalgic and a bit more frosty. That’s because you’ve now entered the forbidding, secretive world of the ‘closed set’ - in which each of the several multimillion-dollar projects being filmed concurrently at Pinewood strives to deny you the merest glimpse of its workings.

On every corner there are security guards with walkie-talkies. Some are there to stop you getting too close to the odd, retro-futuristic New-York-style street where they filmed part of Gulliver’s Travels; others, more numerous, are there to keep you away from the life-sized medieval sailing ship packed with men dressed as knights, which is floating atop a water tank and is about to be swamped by gallons of water dumped down a giant chute.

The sound stage for Harry Potter is even more of a no-no, completely surrounded by screens, though filming finished long ago: through a crack you can make out the branch of what might well be a whomping willow.

Nearby, in one of the underwater stages, the technicians are just clearing up after a scene in which live horses have been filmed wading ashore from the aforementioned medieval sailing ship. It’s for the new Russell Crowe Robin Hood, one of them reveals. The normally clear water (at a near bath-like 31C) is milky with a substance called ‘opacifier’, which makes it look like the sea. On the bottom are 12 tons of sand, now being sucked up by a giant vacuum cleaner.

In post-imperial Britain, even more so in post-Blair-and-Brown Britain, we’ve perhaps grown rather too used to the idea that whatever we were good at once, the rest of the world - America especially - now does better. After a tour around Pinewood, you realise that where the film and TV business is concerned, this is emphatically not true. At Pinewood we can beat Hollywood at its own game. We have the actors, the technicians, the facilities and the technology.

And we’re about to embark on an ingenious new scheme that threatens to make Britain the most desirable film and television location in the world. Its name is Project Pinewood.

‘I remember Ivan coming up to me and saying, “I’ve had this mad idea. It’s so mad that it might just work,”‘ says ITV chairman Michael Grade. He’s talking about business partner Ivan Dunleavy, with whom he bought Pinewood Studios in 2000 at a time ‘when everyone else was trying to get out of the studio business’.

Now Dunleavy is leading me down corridors lined with pictures of past Pinewood greats - Kenneth More, Dirk Bogarde, Sid James, Hattie Jacques - to show me the fruits of his inspiration. It’s still only at the planning stage.

A 4,000-page planning application was last week rejected by South Bucks District Council, but it is expected an appeal will be launched and if all goes well construction will begin in 2012 on one of the most ambitious ventures in screen history: a £200 million cross between a theme park, a film set and Poundbury-style community of 1,400 homes with facades in the style of some of the world’s great cities. In one fell swoop it will double the available production space at Britain’s largest film and TV studio.

Like the Jim Carrey film The Truman Show, whose character lives each day unaware that the town he lives in is really a giant sound stage and that all his friends are make-believe, Pinewood home-owners could find themselves living in the middle of a movie set, surrounded by actors and camera crews.

The house itself could be the star of the show; among the periods and styles to choose from are a New York-style brownstone, Chicago suburb, Georgian town house or Parisian boulevard. Or if those sound too mundane, how about a colonial mansion in New Orleans or an apartment in a Venetian palazzo, complete with authentic canal?

CGI aerial view, showing Chicago streets

But why put homes into the middle of a film set at all?

The reason, perhaps unsurprisingly, is all down to money. Building permanent sets is a hugely costly enterprise, and the project wouldn’t be economically viable without the creation of housing on the site. Pinewood intends to sell this housing stock up front to help fund the project.

The houses will be modern and have all the usual gadgets expected from high-end new builds. The difference will be that strict conditions written into the lease of the properties will prevent owners from holding parties or playing loud music during filming. And they won’t even be able to use their front door at these times, either - although Dunleavy points out that owners will use the back of their homes as their main entrance, as this is where the road and garage will be.

The project, with construction phased over ten years, promises to create 630 jobs (rising to 960 by completion in 2022), house a population of 3,100 (on a 100-acre greenfield site between Pinewood and the M25) and revolutionise film production in Britain by enabling film and TV crews to shoot conveniently and cheaply in perfect replicas of some of the world’s most in-demand locations.

New York brownstones

‘These aren’t just the romanticised pastiches of Europe you find being built in parts of China,’ says project director David Height, of engineering and design firm Ove Arup.

‘The scale, the proportions of the streets, the heights, the building materials and the roofscapes will all replicate as closely as we can those of our chosen cities.’

So who will use the new sets?

Suppose a series editor on The Bill or EastEnders wanted to shoot a drug-dealing plotline in Amsterdam or a techno party in Berlin. At the moment, this would be almost impossible because of the costs of location shooting. But once Project Pinewood is finished it will be easy: not only have the various streetscapes been designed to allow for as many high and low camera angles as possible but there will also be slots where you can simply plug your camera into a lamppost and send a live feed of video footage anywhere in the world.

Partly, Dunleavy explains, this a response to the new technology: ‘The digital age is with us. With HD TV you can see more detail on screen, which means you need correspondingly more realistic sets.’

Partly, he says, it is sound economic sense: ‘It will improve the cost-effectiveness of British film production and make us a more attractive proposition to international film industries.’

That’s the plan, anyway. But first the application must negotiate a series of hurdles, not least the objections of Stop Project Pinewood. This protest group, comprising 20 active members and hundreds of sympathisers, argues that Pinewood has no right to develop what is, after all, 100 acres of precious green-belt land, much loved by the local community.

‘Southeast England is already the most congested part of Europe. If we let 100 acres of green belt go like this it will be more congested still,’ says Stop Project Pinewood’s Sharon Parsons.

‘The Pinewood people will tell you it’s scruffy and useless, but it’s wild and it’s beautiful and it’s full of wildlife and it has been used by locals for leisure and play for 40 years.’

How Pinewood could look - including a screen-crafts academy

Those objections held sway when South Bucks District Council rejected the application last week. But Pinewood is still committed to the project and Dunleavy and Grade are undergoing a ‘period of reflection’ before embarking on the next stage.

Pinewood recognises that it will have to bend over backwards to prove itself a project of ‘national significance’, with advantages far outweighing its drawbacks. That’s why the prospectus in places resembles a checklist of state-endorsed, politically correct pieties: ‘at least 45 per cent reduction in carbon emissions’; 420 out of the 1,400 homes to be ‘affordable housing’; a new training academy for the creative industries; a ‘uniquely vibrant, integrated and accessible environment’.

Even before the setback with their application, this pragmatism has forced Pinewood to scale back some of its crazier ambitions. When first announced two years ago, the project was to have dominated the full 100 acres and was going to include a miniature Lake Como, a Roman amphitheatre, a medieval castle and a Los Angeles high-school campus.

Now greatly revised, it will occupy just 40 acres (the rest being kept as green space) and its only nod to the distant past is a generic Tudor village, while all the represented cities bar New Orleans are in the more temperate regions of the US and Europe.

‘It’s all very carefully researched,’ says Dunleavy later, as we sit in a boardroom furnished with pale, polished wood panels taken from the Mauretania (sister ship of the Lusitania).

‘We looked at 70-odd years of film-making to find out which were the most commonly used streetscapes. Cities in the southern hemisphere were ruled out, simply because they would never look convincing with the English weather. So, too, were cities like Tokyo, whose neon ultra-modernity might have worked well enough as a film set, but less so for a low-key village-y community in the Buckinghamshire green belt.’

Even so, the very idea of bolting on pastiche facades might strike some as appallingly kitsch.

‘Many architects would be horrified by the lack of integrity,’ concedes David Height. ‘But this is one of those few occasions where it makes perfect sense: keeping the outward appearance as close as we can possibly manage to say, the rendered wall of a palazzo in Venice, while having an interior that is entirely contemporary.’

None of the streets will have an exact real-life counterpart. The main reason they’re generic rather than specific is to stop them being too obviously recognisable when they’re used in different films.

Indeed, this problem is another of the objections raised by Stop Project Pinewood.

‘We’ve heard privately from industry insiders that these sets will only be any good for low-budget TV productions, because no major producer is going to want to use a set consisting of one New York street or one Parisian square,’ says Sharon Parsons.

Pinewood’s counter is that, thanks to the miracles of modern post-production, one street can be edited to look like lots of different streets. And each street can be dressed according to the needs of specific productions: adding parking meters, for example.

But the real clincher, Pinewood believes, especially in the teeth of a major global recession, is the economic argument. The British creative industry (film, television, theatre, etc) is one of the few sectors still booming. Between 1997 and 2005 it doubled in size to £61 billion.

It is, claims Michael Grade, the only UK economic sector-projected to grow in the near future. The UK film industry’s annual contribution to this is around £4.2 billion, with much of its activity taking place in Pinewood and its sister studios at Teddington and Shepperton. Last year, Pinewood Group’s turnover was £46 million.

‘We’re doing well,’ says Grade. ‘But when you’re ahead is the time you start to worry. There are countries out there that offer better tax breaks than we do, and cheaper labour. What this does is give Pinewood that extra advantage.’

Right from the start in the Thirties, Pinewood was always intended to act as a creative hub for the film industry, where actors, technicians and craftsmen could congregate in an enclosed, friendly community within easy reach (20 miles) of London.

Heatherden Hall, a Victorian mansion built in mock Georgian style, was bought in the mid-Thirties by entrepreneur Charles Boot and planned as a film-production rival to Hollywood (whose name Pinewood deliberately echoes). Among his partners was the millionaire Methodist flour miller J Arthur Rank, later to become synonymous with film-making, who established his Rank studios here.

It didn’t get off to an inspired start. Many of the films made there were cheap and forgettable. When, during the war, it temporarily housed the Royal Mint, the joke went round that Pinewood had stopped making films but finally started making money.

What Pinewood did very successfully accumulate over the next few decades, though, was heritage of a peculiarly charming and very British kind - from Great Expectations to James Bond. The giant volcano set for You Only Live Twice, built on one of Pinewood’s backlots, was so large that it caused a national scaffolding shortage.

The other quality Pinewood has in spades is talent. Dotted around the site are 320 companies catering for every one of a film production’s needs. There are model-makers, casting agencies, specialist painters who can recreate anything from rust to marble, laundry services, electrical hire companies, stage schools…

If anything goes wrong, film-makers know there’ll be someone at Pinewood able to fix it. And part of the Project Pinewood plan is to build on this tradition.

Dunleavy expects a lot of the properties to be bought by people in the film industry. The low-cost housing will be aimed at students attending a technical college offering film courses, but the more high-end housing will be aimed at people working in the industry - the set designers, costume makers, script writers, producers and actors.

‘We want it to be a bit like F1 racing engineering, where all the various skills congregate,’ explains Dunleavy.

‘The creative industry succeeds best when it’s a collaborative effort, with everyone bouncing ideas off each other.’

There will also be a Screen Crafts academy, providing one-year specialist training courses for students hoping to work in the business.

Some of the properties could be snapped up by commercial companies and let to film studios in need of accommodation for crew filming at Pinewood. There will no doubt also be avid movie fans attracted by the unique opportunity to live in their very own Truman Show.

But what if no one fancies living in a dank Venetian palazzo or a chilly faux-Regency crescent?

Well, of course, as Height explains, they won’t really have to. Behind those carefully wrought facades will be modern apartments and houses, designed and insulated to the highest eco-friendly specifications.

At the front of your home will be your fantasy film locale in New York, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Prague, New Orleans, Venice or rural England, which you’re free to wander round when no one’s filming. But most of your comings and goings will be at the back, where your garden, parking space and main entrance will be, in a house that looks completely modern.

And if you want to get ahead in the movies, why on earth wouldn’t you want to move in?

‘In the end, our business is about one thing: where do film-makers want to make a picture?,’ says Grade.

‘Which is easier: flying your whole production crew to Prague or filming in a controlled environment at Pinewood, where there’s no hassle of having to deal with local authorities, no streets that need clearing, no background noise to worry about? And where if it rains, there’s a sound stage next door where you can do your indoor shoot instead?’

And, adds Grade, the idea has admirers worldwide. ‘You can tell from the reaction we had from studios round the world, as soon as we started publicising it: “This is brilliant. Can you do it for us?”‘