Hepworth Studios: How Walton-on-Thames Invented British Film

For a town best known today for its river and its railway station, Walton-on-Thames has an outsized claim on the early history of British cinema. Between 1899 and 1961, a single site on Hurst Grove operated, under three different names, as one of the country’s most important film studios, and for a period during the First World War it stood alongside only two other British studios of comparable scale. The story ends badly, in a bankruptcy that destroyed most of what the studio had made, but the studio itself shaped the earliest years of a British film industry that barely existed before it arrived.

Cecil Hepworth comes to Hurst Grove, 1899

Cecil Hepworth was still in his twenties when he leased a house called The Rosary, on Hurst Grove, in 1899, paying £36 a year for a property that would become the base of British cinema’s first serious production operation. He installed electric lighting and a film processing laboratory, and, with his cousin Monty Wicks, formed a company known as Hepwix. A small stage, some fifteen feet by eight, was built in the back garden, hardly bigger than the average domestic outbuilding, and it was here that Hepworth began producing the actuality films, brief documentary-style records of real events, that made up most of early cinema’s output.

A hundred films a year

The scale of Hepworth’s early output is easy to underestimate now. By 1900, the studio was producing something in the region of a hundred films a year, most of them short actualities in the style of the period: real events, real places, filmed with the earliest cine equipment and shown to audiences who had never seen moving pictures of anything before. Hepworth filmed Queen Victoria’s funeral procession in 1901, one of the studio’s earliest pieces of genuine news filmmaking, and the studio’s output grew quickly enough that the original back-garden stage was replaced by 1905 with a larger glass-roofed stage, a serious upgrade for a studio still barely five years old.

Alice in Wonderland, 1903

The studio’s best-known early production is its 1903 adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the first film version of the story ever made. It is one of several reasons Walton’s own notable residents list reads more like a cultural cross-section than a simple roll call of the well-known. Seen today it is a curiosity, brief and technically primitive by any later standard, but at the time it represented something genuinely new: a literary classic translated into the still-unproven medium of film, made in a converted house garden in Surrey rather than a purpose-built studio in London or abroad. It set a pattern Hepworth would return to across his career, adapting existing stories and popular material for a medium that was still working out what it was for.

The 1907 fire

Success brought a serious setback in 1907, when a fire destroyed the studio and killed a member of staff. It is a reminder that early film production, working with unstable nitrate stock and improvised electrical installations, carried real physical risk that is easy to forget from a century’s distance. The studio rebuilt rather than closed, and by the time production resumed at scale, Hepworth’s operation was already established enough to recover from a setback that might have ended a smaller company.

The Great War years

By 1914, Hepworth’s studio at Walton was one of only three major film studios operating in Britain, a genuinely significant position for a business that had started in a leased house’s back garden fifteen years earlier. The studio continued production through the First World War, including work that supported the wartime propaganda effort, and the site attracted talent from further afield: the American actress Florence Turner worked at Walton during the war years, evidence that the studio’s reputation extended well beyond Surrey.

The 1923 bankruptcy and the melted negatives

The studio’s most dramatic chapter is also its worst. Hepworth’s company went bankrupt in 1923, undone by mounting competition from bigger, better-capitalised rivals, particularly from the United States. What happened next is the detail that makes the story genuinely painful rather than simply a business failure: the receiver appointed to wind up the company melted down Hepworth’s original negatives, around two thousand films built up over more than two decades of continuous production. Accounts differ on the exact reason: some say the material was sold for its silver content, others that it was reprocessed to make waterproofing resin. Whatever the reason, the loss itself is well documented, and some sources go further, crediting this single event with destroying as much as eighty per cent of all British films made between 1900 and 1929. That figure is hard to pin down precisely: it’s also the rough scale of Britain’s silent-film losses overall, from many causes, and how much of the national total traces to Hepworth’s catalogue specifically isn’t something the sources agree on. What isn’t in dispute is that it ranks among the starkest single archival losses in the history of British cinema, and it happened in Walton.

Nettlefold and Walton Studios

The site did not stay derelict for long. Archibald Nettlefold bought the studio in 1926 and renamed it Nettlefold Studios, producing silent films and, once sound arrived in the early 1930s, a steady stream of “quota quickies”, the low-budget British films made to satisfy legal requirements for a minimum proportion of British-made content in cinema programmes. During the Second World War the buildings were requisitioned by the government, and Vickers-Armstrong used part of the site to build aircraft hangars, a wartime use that briefly connected the old film studio to the same aircraft industry that had made nearby Brooklands a bombing target. Ernest G. Roy acquired the site in 1947, and Sapphire Films bought and renamed it Walton Studios in 1955, the name under which the site is now best remembered locally.

Closure in 1961

Walton Studios ceased trading and closed permanently in March 1961, its equipment and remaining production work transferring to Shepperton, which by then had eclipsed Walton as Surrey’s major film production centre. The studio buildings were subsequently demolished, and the site was redeveloped for housing, closing a chapter that had run, under one name or another, for well over sixty years.

What remains: the Playhouse

Almost nothing of the original studio survives above ground, with one significant exception. The studio’s power house, the building that once supplied the site’s electricity, was converted into a performance venue in 1925 and survives today as the Cecil Hepworth Playhouse, still in use and still carrying Hepworth’s name. It later became home to the Walton Hop, the music venue whose own story picks up where the film studio’s ends. Walton’s connection to its film history is also marked more informally: Hepworth’s early films are periodically projected at the entrance to The Heart on the High Street, a small, deliberate reminder, in the middle of a modern shopping centre, of what once happened a short walk away.