30 years of Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies: how the London locations look today
Three decades after it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, we went looking for the locations where Mike Leigh shot his bittersweet drama about an adopted daughter reconnecting with her birth mother.
Mike Leigh is one of the great chroniclers of everyday British life on the big screen. Much of his work looks specifically at life in London, turning quotidian existence in the capital into award-winning drama in films such as High Hopes (1988), Life Is Sweet (1990) and Naked (1993). The most internationally acclaimed of these is Secrets & Lies, which – 30 years ago – won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1996 and was nominated for five Oscars.
Leigh’s film follows the complex, interconnected lives of several characters living in the city’s suburbs. Maurice (Timothy Spall) has managed to escape his working-class East End roots with a successful photography company. However, his relationship with wife, Monica (Phyllis Logan), is fractured and troubled by something unnamed. Life has been tougher for Maurice’s sister, Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn), who is still living in their childhood home with her adult daughter, Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook). The pressure increases with the arrival of Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), who has discovered that Cynthia is her birth mother, who many years previously put her up for adoption.
Working alongside his regular director of photography Dick Pope, Leigh is expert at depicting suburbia on film, finding visual interest in all kinds of down-to-earth locations and often filming in places that had rarely if ever been put onto the big screen before. Here are some of the film’s key locations as they stand today.
Aldwych
Hortense visits the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys several times throughout the film in order to follow the paper trail of her own identity. This is seen in Aldwych at the end of Kingsway.
She approaches the office’s spinning door and goes through. Today, the architectural frame is still there but the entrance has dramatically changed.
The records that Hortense is looking for are housed in St Catherine’s House, which is still a records office today though the large sign suggesting its name has long since gone.
Holborn
Further up the road, and later in the film, Hortense finally arranges to meet Cynthia for the first time. Their rendezvous point is at the other end of Kingsway outside Holborn tube station.
Leigh opens the scene with a slow pan downwards from the tube logo to the station name. This is likely shot from the middle of the busy road so is difficult to recreate.
Equally, the presence of modern booths selling coffee and magazines make this shot of the two characters directly outside the entrance impossible to recreate from its original vantage point.
Winchmore Hill
Maurice makes a good living from photography, specifically portrait and wedding photography. He has a studio which sits on The Green in Winchmore Hill, in the southern reaches of Enfield. Today, the building is now a restaurant.
Opposite the shop, there’s a small green with several benches. We see at one point the photography studio’s previous owner, Stuart (Ron Cook), milling around outside.
As Stuart approaches the shop, we see more of the green outside. This is still generally as seen in the film.
Hoxton
Cynthia lives with Roxanne in a terraced house in Hoxton. The street is seen multiple times in the film, in particular number 76 where the interiors of the film were also shot. Architecturally, the street is as it was.
Various different perspectives of the street feature throughout. In this shot, when Maurice arrives to visit his sister, Leigh shoots the road looking towards Durant Street.
Another shot shows Cynthia walking away from her house with boyfriend, Paul (Lee Ross). This is taken just at the juncture of the street with Barnet Grove.
Finally, when Hortense drops Cynthia off home, Leigh films the corner of the street from the perspective of Durant Street, highlighting the more modern block of flats behind the terraces.
Barnet
The majority of the film’s location work centres around Maurice’s house in Barnet. The house is 120 Whitehouse Way and is still almost exactly as seen in the film (though cars made it impossible to accurately recreate the angle on the visit).
As the film approaches its climactic birthday party, the arrival of the guests allows for several further shots of Whitehouse Way, which is typical Mike Leigh-ish suburbia.
After some of the dramatic revelations at the party, Roxanne runs out with Paul. Maurice follows them and is first seen walking at the end of Whitehouse Way.
Roxanne and Paul are sat waiting at the opposite bus stop on Hampden Way.
The bus stop is still there today, as is the green space seen behind it in this closer shot.
