Beautiful Thing: finding the Thamesmead locations for the classic 90s gay romance

One of the defining British queer films of the 1990s, Beautiful Thing follows the coming-of-age story of two working-class young men realising that they are gay. Jamie (Glen Berry) is bullied at school for his increasingly obvious sexuality, while Ste (Scott Neal) is very much in denial about his growing feelings for his schoolmate. Both boys live in the estates of Thamesmead and have complicated family lives – Jamie dealing with his mother Sandra (Linda Henry) and her lover Tony (Ben Daniels), and Ste with his alcoholic father Ronnie (Garry Cooper). As their feelings become apparent to their peers, the film’s drama hinges on whether the two boys will be accepted for who they are when they eventually come out.

The film’s script was adapted by Jonathan Harvey from his own play, and based on his time working as a special-needs teacher at a school in south-east London. Director Hettie Macdonald had worked on the theatrical version at the Bush Theatre in 1994, leading to the opportunity to make her film directorial debut. The result showcases her talent for working with ensemble casts, although she’s since worked mainly in theatre and TV, including episodes of Doctor Who and Normal People. She didn’t make another feature film until 2023’s The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry.

Beautiful Thing makes excellent use of its Thamesmead locations, filming extensively in and around the riverside area with a focus especially on its brutalist social housing. With London’s never-ending development, however, tracking down some of these settings proved more than a little more difficult. The area has seen a great many changes over the last few years.

Here are five locations from Beautiful Thing as they stand today.

The film opens with a very familiar horror in coming-of-age dramas: sports at school. The sport in question is football, which we see being played on a patch of grass in Thamesmead by Miss Chauhan (Meera Syal) and new sports teacher Mr Bennett (Martin Walsh). The blocks of flats seen in the background are those on Yarnton Way.

After suffering a bout of bullying, Jamie is done with the lesson and decides to hop over the fence into the road adjacent to the field. The location is St Katherine’s Road, marked by its distinctive garages.

As the film’s opening titles begin, we see Jamie running down St Katherine’s Road towards Yarnton Way and the area’s more recognisable brutalist architecture.

Behind Beautiful Thing’s titles, we see several views of the estate in its last gasp before development started. Jamie is shown running across a concrete bridge as he heads back home. The bridge was further down Yarnton Way and both sides have since been entirely demolished.

The steps Jamie is seen climbing once looked down onto a square. The square and the steps were built on some time ago.

While the whole of the area has been restructured, one feature seen during the titles that has survived is the block of flats. However, the steps have gone and the whole area around it has sprouted new luxury flats.

When Jamie and Ste finally begin to accept who they are, they venture out of Thamesmead to a gay pub. The pub in question is in Greenwich and we first see it from the perspective of King William Walk.

The Gloucester itself is still a pub but is now the Greenwich Tavern, with some of its period features hidden by a wall of fake plants.

The pub that Sandra is hoping to manage is also in Greenwich. It’s called The Anchor in the film, but the pub is in fact the famed Cutty Sark.

Macdonald films shots outside and inside the pub. This shot shows the largely unchanged view looking east on Ballast Quay, a shot also seen in Barney Platts-Mills’ earlier coming-of-age classic Bronco Bullfrog (1969).

This shot gives a wider view of the area though the cranes for the docks have long since gone.

The estates around Southmere in Thamesmead are seen throughout the film. Perhaps most famous for their use in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), the housing project built by Greater London Council really defined both the innovations and flaws with the period’s architecture. As with many such experiments, they have largely been (or are in the process of being) demolished. I visited the site of Beautiful Thing’s locations in 2019 before demolition had been completed, though the area had been closed off to the public even then. We see Ste looking out over the water of Southmere at night after a family fight. The shot looked north and its location was preserved until three years ago when the whole side of the estate was flattened.

The pub on the water where Sandra works was the Lakeside Bar. One of the few buildings still standing by the lake, the bar is now in the slow process of being turned into an arts centre. On the visit in 2019, it was merely derelict.

Seen from the now demolished side of the water, the four tower blocks are still standing. The view is also seen in the marina fight scene from A Clockwork Orange. Though the blocks are still there, with so much development in the area, it’s difficult to say how long these remnants of the original design will last.

IMDb
London on Location

Beautiful Thing is out now on BFI Blu-ray, iTunes and Prime Video.