Qualla: Elstree https://qualla.com/elstree en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:40:14 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/v/elstree-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Elstree https://qualla.com/elstree Elstree: Introduction https://qualla.com/elstree/ Photo credit David Howard, CC BY-SA 2.0. Elstree is barely a village. About five thousand people live there, on the old A5 north-west of London where Watling Street begins to climb out of the Thames basin towards St Albans. It is leafy, it is quiet, and it has been steadily eaten by the suburb of Borehamwood to its north for the last hundred years. But the name belongs to film history. The studios that bear it, sitting just over the boundary in Borehamwood proper, made the original Star Wars trilogy, every Indiana Jones film, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow, the Harry Potter productions of the early 2000s, and - since 1985 - every single episode of EastEnders. The Anglo-Saxons called the place Tidulfres treow, meaning Tidwulf's Tree. The eagles are mentioned in seventeenth-century records as well. None of that quite prepared the village for what arrived in 1914.

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Image: David Howard | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/v/elstree-wp/gcpv-elstree-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Elstree: Tidwulf's Tree https://qualla.com/elstree/ Photo credit Martin Addison, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Anglo-Saxon name appears in a charter of 786 in the form Tidulfres treow - Tidwulf's tree. Over the next eight hundred years the spelling drifted through Eaglestre and Ilstrye and Idlestrye before settling on Elstree by the eighteenth century. The topographer John Norden, wri...

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Image: Martin Addison | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/v/elstree-wp/gcpv-elstree-tidwulfs-tree.mp3 0:06 2 full Elstree: The Murder of Martha Ray https://qualla.com/elstree/ Photo credit HMIAN, CC BY-SA 4.0. The most extraordinary single event in the village's pre-cinema history happened in London in 1779, but the burial was in Elstree. Martha Ray was a singer and the long-term mistress of John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich - the same Earl of Sandwich whose name is on, among othe...

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Image: HMIAN | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/v/elstree-wp/gcpv-elstree-the-murder-of-martha-ray.mp3 0:06 3 full Elstree: When the Cameras Arrived https://qualla.com/elstree/ Photo credit Martin Addison, CC BY-SA 2.0. The film industry came in 1914, when Percy Nash built Neptune Studios just over the village boundary in Borehamwood. By the 1920s there were six separate studios in the area, all of them trading on the village name even when their actual address was elsewhere. Alfred Hitchcock ma...

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Image: Martin Addison | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/v/elstree-wp/gcpv-elstree-when-the-cameras-arrived.mp3 0:06 4 full Elstree: Albert Square in a Field https://qualla.com/elstree/ Photo credit David Hawgood, CC BY-SA 2.0. The BBC Elstree Centre, a separate complex from the film studios down the road, opened on a former ATV site in 1984 and was almost immediately repurposed to host the new soap opera the BBC was developing as a rival to ITV's Coronation Street. EastEnders began filming there in lat...

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Image: David Hawgood | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/v/elstree-wp/gcpv-elstree-albert-square-in-a-field.mp3 0:06 5 full Elstree: A Village That Became an Adjective https://qualla.com/elstree/ Photo credit Duncan Lilly, CC BY-SA 2.0. Stanley Kubrick is buried about ten miles away, but he lived for the last quarter-century of his life in a house on Barnet Lane in Elstree, walking the dogs along the lanes between filming The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut. Peter Sellers, Tom Cruise, and John Cleese all stayed at Th...

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Image: Duncan Lilly | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/v/elstree-wp/gcpv-elstree-a-village-that-became-an-adjective.mp3 0:06 6 full