NORTH BY NORTHWEST HITCHCOCK PUB
Film Director Inspired Watering Hole in London's Islington
Alfred Hitchcock’s masterwork film of North by Northwest was neither filmed nor had any story settings in England, but a new addition to the London suburban pub scene has taken up residence in the burb of Islington, taking its name inspiration from its point on the map and dedicated to the memory of the great film directing icon. The walls are decorated with mostly photographic memorabilia on the Hitchcock theme, and offers a pub menu of assorted upscale comfort gastropub foods from honey mustard sausages to burgers, crab linguini, scotch egg and chicken wings, craft beers and coffees.
Why Hitchcock? Hitch moved to Hollywood in 1939 to work for Selznick after several hit thrillers in England, from "The 39 Steps" to "The Lady Vanishes", but his film career began as a title writer for silent films in 1920 within few blocks of where the pub is located at the Islington Film Studios. The studios are long gone, now, flattened for a block of flats which now occupy the space, but where one of the legendary film careers began. In 1919, the American film company of Jesse Lasky, Famous Players (see Lasky Hollywood Heritage Museum) which ultimately became Paramount, decided to open a London subsidiary film studio in Islington and bought the a defunct railway power station for the Great Northern and City Railway on Poole Street, converting the building into two filming stages.
Lasky only lasted a couple of years at the location and British entrepreneur film producer Michael Bacon took over and formed Gainsborough Pictures, which later merged with British Gaumont. Balcon retained the young Alfred Hitchcock on staff and assigned him to work with a director of the pun-inviting name of Graham Cutts. Hitchcock filled several roles as screenwriter, art director, and assistant director, getting his first directing credit in 1925 after five years, with his first real hit film coming in 1927, “The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog” about the hunt for a Jack the Ripper sort of serial killer on the loose in killer fog London, beginning his signature suspense thriller style.
Curiously Hitchcock’s seminal credits were not filmed in Islington, but in Germany, working with Cutts in filming at the Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam near Berlin, where he could observe the German expressionist master F.W. Murnau, and at the Geiselgastieg Studio in Munich (now BavariaFilm Studio). The German style influenced the design of many of Hitchcock’s works, even after his move to Hollywood. The fast rising Hitchcock was soon signed by the new British International Pictures and moved his filming to Elstree Studios where he filmed Britain’s first talking feature picture, Blackmail in 1929 and made his base for the next decade, though he returned to Islington to film parts of "The Lady Vanishes".
Visiting the North By Northwest Pub
The North By Northwest Pub is located at 188 New N Rd, London N1 7BJ. It has a collection of photographs of the director over the years, and even plays some of Hitchcock’s films on a screen to contemplate while downing a pint of IPA. It has a quiz contest every Thursday at 8 pm. It’s a little out of the way for the casual traveler to London, but worth a visit for the obsessed “Hitch” stalker. © Bargain
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North By Northwest Pub
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