Walking In Their Footsteps - Hampstead Heath and South End Green (Smiley's People Locations)
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I know from corresponding with many visitors to this website that a lot of people enjoy visiting the places where these series were filmed. The fact that they were shot entirely on location is a gift to those of us that love them - almost fifty years later we can still follow in Smiley's footsteps.
There is one locale where it is actually possible to spend a bit of time in Smiley's world and retrace his journey at the start of Smiley's People. While visiting Hampstead Heath and South End Green the thought occurred to me that there were so many points of interest, it would be possible to write this piece as a walking tour.
So if you'd like to spend a few hours in the company of George Smiley and John le Carré then step this way.
Before you set out I would recommend that you:
- Allow two and a half hours for the walk. This should give you plenty of time.
- Wear comfortable shoes and be aware that whilst most of the walk is on footpaths there is a sports field you will need to cross which may be wet and/or muddy.
- Watch episodes one and two of Smiley's People before you visit the location.
- Pack an umbrella, drawing pin and chalk!
All written directions are highlighted like this in black and are designed to accompany the various maps and satellite images.
First off, make your way to Hampstead Heath Station on the London Overground which is the starting point of our tour. From here you will be walking to...
1. John le Carré's house while he was writing Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley's People (1 Gayton Crescent) - 0.5 miles (15 minutes)
As you come out of the overground station turn right and walk up South End Road. Turn left on to Downshire Hill and immediately right on to Willow Road. Take the third turning on the left into Gayton Crescent and follow the road round until it almost joins with Gayton Road. On your left you will find 1 Gayton Crescent.
When this house was last on the market it was described as follows:
A substantial and elegant Victorian end of terrace five floored family home set behind a gated entrance with paved front garden in a prominent position moments from Hampstead High Street and The Heath. We are informed that John le Carré lived in this house where he wrote Smiley's People and Tinker Tailor Solider Spy.
Le Carré set several scenes at the start of Smiley's People within easy walking distance of his own front door! It's not hard to imagine him conjuring up these events while he was out walking the whippets or popping down the road for a newspaper or a pint of milk.
Incidentally, we know Guinness came here during the filming of the scenes on Hampstead Heath and you will read more about that later.
So let's meet up with Smiley at the point where he comes into the narrative in Smiley's People...
2. Corner of Well Walk and East Heath Road - 0.3 miles (7 minutes)
As you stand on the corner of Gayton Crescent turn right on to Gayton Road. At the end of Gayton Road walk across Willow Road into Well Walk and continue to the end of the road. On the corner of Well Walk and East Heath Road you will see 'The Pryors' on your right and a footpath straight ahead of you. That footpath will lead to Lime Avenue.
Cross the road here and make your way down the footpath with 'The Pryors' on your right.
The novel and the television series match each other closely when describing the events and locations we are looking at. We will use both sources and highlight where there are differences.
“The flat smelt of old nappies and stale cigarettes and was on the top floor of a scrolled Edwardian apartment house not two hundred yards from Hampstead Heath. ”
-Excerpt from Smiley's People
'The Pryors' was built in 1908 which certainly dates it as Edwardian and it seems highly likely le Carré had this location in mind when he wrote the book. It looks quite run down in the series but today these apartments are upmarket.
We know from our interview with Stephen Riddle that 'The Pryors' was also used as the internal location of the safe flat where Vladimir and Mostyn were due to meet (and where Smiley eventually arrives for his briefing). According to Guinness's diary, these scenes were filmed on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th of September 1981.
You'll see a side gate to 'The Pryors' on your right and if you keep walking around the building you will come to another side entrance.
This is where Guinness was filmed leaving the property near the end of episode one.
If you walk back from here to join Lime Avenue you are walking precisely in Smiley's footsteps at the end of episode one.
As Smiley looks to his right down Lime Avenue (which le Carré describes as 'an avenue of beeches' in the novel) he can see the police vans clearing up at the scene of the murder...
...then he turns to make his way back to East Heath Road as the episode ends.
In both the novel and the television adaptation, Smiley comes back to Hampstead Heath after he has been to Vladimir's apartment in Paddington. So we'll pick up Smiley at exactly the same spot on Lime Avenue where you are standing, but for him of course this is now a return visit.
3. Pavilion on Hampstead Heath - 0.7 miles (16 minutes)
Keep 'The Pryors' on your right and walk down Lime Avenue. As the avenue begins to rise after the dip you will eventually meet an intersection of paths with a playing field on your right.
The scenes of Smiley's walk to the pavilion are not featured in the television series but the novel provides us with all the information we need to find the pavilion:
“He stood at the mouth of the avenue, gazing into the ranks of beech trees as they sank away from him like a retreating army into the mist. The darkness had departed reluctantly, leaving an indoor gloom. It could have been dusk already: tea-time in an old country house. The street lights either side of him were poor candles, illuminating nothing.
He advanced and the avenue darkened round him, the mist thickened. His footsteps echoed tinnily ahead of him. Twenty yards higher, brown sunlight burned like a slow bonfire in its own smoke. But down here in the dip the mist had collected in a cold fog, and Vladimir was very dead after all. He saw tyre marks where the police cars had parked. He noticed the absence of leaves and the unnatural cleanness of the gravel. What do they do? he wondered. Hose the gravel down? Sweep the leaves into more plastic pillowcases?
His tiredness had given way to a new and mysterious clarity. He continued up the avenue...looking for a tin pavilion by a playing field. Take it in sequence, he told himself. Take it from the beginning.
He reached an intersection of paths and crossed it, still climbing. To his right, goal-posts appeared, and beyond them a green pavilion of corrugated iron, apparently empty."
-Excerpt From Smiley's People
The only thing missing today from le Carré's description are the goal posts!
This is the view of the pavilion you get from Lime Avenue...
Make your way across the field to the pavilion...
“He started across the field, rain-water seeping into his shoes. Behind the hut ran a steep mud bank scoured with children’s slides. He climbed the bank, entered a coppice, and kept climbing. The fog had not penetrated the trees and by the time he reached the brow it had cleared. There was still no one in sight. Returning, he approached the pavilion through the trees.”
- Excerpt from Smiley's People
...and examines the drawing pin and chalk mark on one of the posts. Today the wooden cover for the metal posts is gone, so the drawing pin won't work!
Le Carré describes what Smiley sees in the novel like this:
“It was a tin box, no more, with one side open to the field. The only furniture was a rough wood bench slashed and written on with knives, the only occupant a prone figure stretched on it, with a blanket pulled over his head and brown boots protruding. For an undisciplined moment Smiley wondered whether he too had had his face blown off. Girders held up the roof; earnest moral statements enlivened the flaking green paint. “Punk is destructive. Society does not need it.” The assertion caused him a moment’s indecision. “Oh, but society does,” he wanted to reply; “society is an association of minorities.” The drawing-pin was where Mostyn had said it was, at head height exactly, in the best Sarratt tradition of regularity, its Circus-issue brass head as new and as unmarked as the boy who had put it there.
Proceed to the rendezvous, it said; no danger sighted.”
- Excerpt from Smiley's People
Chris, who contributes regularly to this website, tells me this is still the original pavilion that he has visited since the 80s. There have been two alterations - the walls have been removed and, sometime after 2008, so has the wooden cover that remained on one of the uprights. (Of course the walls and seats of the original pavilion were the inspiration for the title sequence of the television series.)
4. Possible location of the tree where Vladimir hid the cigarette packet - 0.3 miles (7 minutes)
Retrace your steps back across the field to Lime Avenue and proceed back to the dip in the path.
“Leaving the hut, Smiley moved a short distance back along the route he had just come. And as he walked, he meticulously called to mind the Superintendent’s reconstruction of Vladimir’s last journey, drawing upon his memory as if it were an archive.”
- Excerpt from Smiley's People
So we are now with Smiley retracing Vladimir's steps to the place where he hid the negative in the cigarette packet. Some of what follows is guess work, but it is informed guess work!
We know from the above quote that it was a short distance back to where Vladimir's body was discovered. In the television series we can see Smiley walking back down Lime Avenue towards the dip and turning to his right off the path.
Step off the path to your right at this point between the two highlighted trees.
Now read this description from the novel:
“Looking round him, Smiley became aware of a peculiar feature of his location. Here, almost between two trees, at the very edge of the avenue, at the point where the fog was approaching its thickest, he was as good as out of sight. The avenue descended, yes, and lifted ahead of him. But it also curved, and from where he stood the upward line of sight in both directions was masked by tree trunks and a dense thicket of saplings. Along the whole path of Vladimir’s last frantic journey—a path he knew well, remember, had used for similar meetings—this was the one point, Smiley realised with increasing satisfaction, where the fleeing man was out of sight from both ahead of him and behind him.”
- Excerpt from Smiley's People
And I can confirm if you step off the avenue between those two trees you are hidden from 'the upward line of sight in both directions'. It's that second tree in the background in the photo above that caught my eye.
It's forty three years since these scenes were filmed but Nick Harkaway revealed in an interview in 2021 that the tree in question was still standing. We think it is very likely that the tree shown below is the one used for filming the retrieval of the packet of cigarettes.
Le Carré describes the location of the cigarette packet as 'in a branch, slipped into the fork just where it joined its parent trunk'. When no-one was looking I reached up with my imaginary brolly and would have been able to retrieve a cigarette packet from that location.
There is just one more mystery on Hampstead Heath. Where were the scenes with Guinness and Michael Elphick filmed? It is possible they may have been shot in this precise area but the scene is too dark to confirm that. There is certainly a gradient present (see below) which makes me think they may have filmed either nearer the pavilion or 'The Pryors' where the slopes would be steeper, but without inside knowledge I suspect we will never know.
Filming of all the scenes on Hampstead Heath took place between the 20th and 22nd October 1981.
In an interview at the NFT in 2002, John le Carré recalled the night the crew were filming the discovery of Vladimir’s body on Hampstead Heath.
On the night shoot in ‘Smiley's People’, where the General is lying dead on Hampstead Heath, Michael Elphick plays the copper. He was so nervous about acting opposite Guinness that he over-refreshed himself. That was his problem. So, the scene had to be abandoned, which was a very expensive thing to do on a night shoot. Because it was near our house in Hampstead, we brought everyone in for a drink. Alec was seething. My wife took him downstairs and gave him a large scotch.
He said, "It is exactly the same, as far as I'm concerned, as a soldier going to sleep on sentry duty."
He had his drink and then straightened himself up, went upstairs and was sweet to everybody. He gave Elphick a little pat and went home. That was Alec, having created antithesis, having to restore thesis and go.
5. Telephone box on South End Green - 0.8 miles (20 minutes)
For the next part of our walk we are literally following in Smiley's footsteps as he makes his way along Lime Avenue to East Heath Road and back past Hampstead Heath Overground Station to South End Green.
Le Carré describes his journey this way in the novel.
“Braving the traffic, he followed the narrow pavement down the hill till he came to South End Green, where he hoped for a café that would give him tea. Finding none open so early, he sat on a bench across from a cinema instead, contemplating an old marble fountain and a pair of red telephone-boxes, one filthier than the other. A warm drizzle was falling; a few shopkeepers had started lowering their awnings; a delicatessen store was taking delivery of bread. He sat with hunched shoulders, and the damp points of his mackintosh collar stabbed his unshaven cheeks whenever he turned his head.”
- Excerpt from Smiley's People
South End Green has really not changed much since filming took place on the 29th October 1981. The only significant difference is that the ABC cinema has been demolished and an M&S Food Hall now stands in its place.
...and this is how the location looks today.
It is similar right down to the same model of phone boxes. However, Chris drew my attention to a discrepancy about the phone boxes in the series though. Here's Smiley making his call to 'Straight and Steady Minicabs'.
That's clearly South End Road in the background but the phone box is now a different model! It's a K6 with wider central panes of glass. The same box is used again for the reverse shot of Ferguson driving past. (Incidentally, just behind Ferguson we can see the steps of the old ABC cinema.)
If Smiley is supposed to be standing in the phone box we see him enter, we ought to be able to see the edge of the other box in the shot, as we can in the recent photo below:
All of which means they used a 'prop' phone box, which was probably situated right next to the other boxes. I suspect there are two reasons for this:
- The wider central pane of glass makes it easier for us to see Smiley in the box and to capture the reverse shot of Ferguson.
- By using a stand alone box director Simon Langton was able to capture Ferguson parking his bike in the background of the shot while Smiley is on the phone - see below.
When Smiley has finished his call we cut to him walking back up South End Road towards the newsagents. Once again, the use of a long focal length lens makes everything in the background look much closer to the camera than it actually is.
The convenience store at 21 South End Road is the location of the newsagents.
For those interested in local history the store owner has on display an image of the store as it looked in 1910 and was happy for me to take this photo...
The date of the above photo must be close to correct, as the headline boards are reporting the Hawes Junction Rail Crash on Christmas Eve 1910.
We can be certain of the location by comparing this screen cap from the series, which is taken immediately after Smiley has turned right out of the newsagents...
...with a recent street view.
Dominique's was originally the greengrocers - note the white bands on the brickwork and the fire hydrant sign, which is now placed lower than it was in 1981. To the left of Dominique's/the greengrocer, we can see an entrance that leads behind the shops in both images. Also, the distinctive bollard in front of Dominique's looks like it might be the same one we see in front of the greengrocers.
By this point, I think you've earned a cup of coffee and there are several coffee shops nearby.
When ordering your drink you could enhance your Smiley's People experience by whispering quietly in your baristas ear 'Tell Max I have two proofs and it concerns The Sandman'. Don't be surprised if they respond by saying 'I'm afraid Max isn't here right now' or 'I don't know anyone called Max' - they are all trained to respond in this way.
Why not enjoy your drink on a bench in South End Green with the M&S Foodhall behind you. This is where Smiley returns following his trip to the newsagent.
You might be interested to know that the films showing at the ABC behind Smiley were 'The History of the World Part 1', 'Honkey Tonk Freeway' and 'The Four Seasons'.
In the recent photo below the bench on the right is the closest you can get to the spot where Smiley was sitting.
It is at this point in the series that we hear Guinness's voiceover, as Smiley reads the letter Madame Ostrakova sent to the General. Le Carré describes this scene in the novel as follows:
“Smiley remembered the brown envelope from Paris, and tore it open, expecting what? A bill probably, some hangover from the old boy’s life there. Or one of those cyclo-styled battle-cries that émigrés send each other like Christmas cards. But this was neither a bill nor a circular but a personal letter: an appeal, but of a very special sort. Unsigned, no address for the sender. In French, handwritten very fast. Smiley read it once and he was reading it a second time when an overpainted Ford Cortina, driven by a boy in a polo-neck pullover, skidded to a giddy halt outside the cinema. Returning the letter to his pocket, he crossed the road to the car.”
- Excerpt from Smiley's People
From where you are sitting look slightly to your right and this is what you'll see...
And if we zoom in a little closer we can see 'The Garden Gate' pub (formerly known as 'The Railway Tavern') on the corner...
Mr Lamb pulls up here in his Ford Cortina and sounds his horn. (I suspect they decided to have the taxi arrive here rather than the main road in front of the cinema, as that would have been a more difficult filming location.)
And we can see how this looks from the satellite view...
A couple of years ago, Chris sent me a story about the filming of Smiley's People that was associated with this pub . Unfortunately, neither of us can find the source but I suspect it was in a local newspaper. Here's the story:
We have no way of corroborating this account but it has the ring of truth, with one exception. Guinness had a suite at The Connaught permanently at his disposal and was usually chauffeured to location filming around London. The likelihood of the BBC putting him up in a local pub is slim. However, the BBC did use church halls and pub function rooms as make up studios for location filming, so it is very plausible that Guinness would have been going in and out of 'The Railway' for that reason.
I hope you have enjoyed this little pilgrimage. We are lucky that all these locations are largely unchanged and very recognisable from what appears on screen and in the novel.
If you enjoyed our walking tour do drop us a line and let us know at guinnessissmiley@icloud.com We'd welcome any feedback or suggestions that would improve the experience for future visitors.
Screencaptures (c) BBC 1982
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