On Loca­tion: The bru­tal­ist tow­er blocks of A Clock­work Orange

Lit­tered with some of the most star­tling images of British bru­tal­ist archi­tec­ture ever cap­tured, Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange is a social doc­u­ment as much as a dystopi­an sci­ence-fic­tion film. Based on Antho­ny Burgess’ 1962 nov­el of the same name, the film fol­lows a mur­der­ous gang of ​‘Droogs’ led by Alex (Mal­colm McDow­ell) fac­ing the sur­round­ing real­i­ties of vio­lence, pun­ish­ment and pow­er of the state.

It seems a hap­py acci­dent that Kubrick cap­tured so much new archi­tec­ture, the direc­tor unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly opt­ing to shoot much of the film on loca­tion. Fol­low­ing 2001: A Space Odyssey, released two years before film­ing began on A Clock­work Orange, Kubrick saw his bud­get slashed, with the stu­dio want­i­ng him to prove that he could deliv­er a film on less mon­ey. Sub­se­quent­ly, few sets were constructed.

Yet rely­ing on real-world loca­tions was also fit­ting for Kubrick’s cre­ative aims: not to show­case a glossy, futur­is­tic world but one that was very much ground­ed in the present, a threat­en­ing future lurk­ing just around the cor­ner. Because of this, many of the loca­tions cho­sen were every­day build­ings, from Brunel Uni­ver­si­ty to the famous Chelsea Drug­store on the King’s Road to an under­pass along Wandsworth Bridge. As Kubrick once sug­gest­ed to the French crit­ic Michel Ciment, he and his team researched the most mod­ern build­ings of the peri­od through mag­a­zines: ​“The loca­tions were sup­posed to look a bit futur­is­tic, and we did our pre­lim­i­nary loca­tion search by look­ing through back issues of sev­er­al British archi­tec­tur­al mag­a­zines, get­ting our leads for most of the loca­tions that way.”

The most strik­ing build­ing in the film is the tow­er block where Alex lives with his par­ents, filmed on the bru­tal­ist South­mere Estate in Thames­mead. Part­ly colour­ing the per­cep­tion of the area’s lev­el of crime, Kubrick’s use of the loca­tion is per­haps the film’s most aston­ish­ing visu­al space. The whole area was rebuilt in the late 1960s, fash­ioned around a vari­ety of angu­lar build­ings and motor­ways, pro­vid­ing both expan­sive zones – includ­ing the mari­na seen in the film, designed reduce crime via the calm­ing pres­ence of water – and cramped pas­sages and alley­ways. It was the sup­posed future of cities and only a few years old at the time of filming.

Used in the famous scene of Alex’s retak­ing com­mand of the Droogs, the pho­tog­ra­phy ren­ders the build­ings with an unusu­al feel­ing, simul­ta­ne­ous­ly rep­re­sent­ing a mor­bid future and a failed present. Its real­i­sa­tion is incred­i­bly true to Burgess’ orig­i­nal descrip­tion of the scene: ​“As we walked along the flat block mari­na, I was calm on the out­side, but think­ing all the time… Now it was love­ly music that came to my aid. There was a win­dow open with the stereo on, and I vid­died right at once what to do.” It’s impos­si­ble to re-read this moment with­out see­ing Thamesmead’s tow­er blocks reflect­ed in the water, the strange steps lead­ing down to the mari­na and the con­crete designs jut­ting out in unusu­al prisms and cubes.

Vis­it­ing the loca­tion today, it’s clear that much has changed – and quite recent­ly, too. The area has been sub­ject to a devel­op­ment pro­pos­al in line with Cross­rail (a dystopi­an project in itself, eas­i­ly sit­u­at­ed in the same uni­verse as the Ludovi­co Treat­ment), mean­ing a total restruc­tur­ing of the town. The estate Alex lives on in the film is cur­rent­ly in the process of rede­vel­op­ment and is being slow­ly demol­ished. The main sequence of Kubrick’s film­ing took place behind Bin­sey Walk and a large gap now exists where the build­ings once curved around the marina’s water.

All of the entrance­ways are closed off, with only one open­ing left where the bins were once kept, now occu­pied by a few home­less peo­ple. Walk­ing to the oth­er side of the mari­na, a blue wood­en pan­el blocked off access but was easy to bypass. The con­trast between Kubrick’s images and the build­ing today is sur­re­al. Where­as the Droogs walked on pris­tine con­crete, the path­way is now over­grown with weeds. And with the adja­cent mari­na cov­ered in algae, the whole area feels more like JG Ballard’s ​‘The Drowned World’ than Burgess’ nov­el. The build­ing which orig­i­nal­ly stood in the back­ground has already been demol­ished, so tak­ing a pho­to­graph is to cap­ture only a frag­ment of how it looked to Kubrick’s eye.

There is under­stand­able resis­tance from the remain­ing res­i­dents to being moved, even with the acknowl­edged issues that emerged as a result of the estate’s design mere years after it was com­plet­ed. It seems iron­ic that, in images of one of the stark­est depic­tions of dystopia in film, there appears to be more life in Alex’s world than the place as its exists today. Kubrick’s film presents spaces that reflect the cold bru­tal­i­ty of bina­ries: good and evil, pun­ish­ment and reform, present and future. The real Thames­mead is now crum­bling into mem­o­ry, but at least we have A Clock­work Orange to remind us of this once bold vision of social housing.