Allied|Pullens Buildings and Iliffe Yard, Walworth — a wartime street that needed almost no dressing

When Max goes to see his sister, the film puts him in a corner of London that looks like it has not been repainted since the Blitz. That corner is real. The Pullens Buildings, off Crampton Street in Walworth, are late-Victorian tenements built in the 1880s by the developer James Pullen, and the location scouts took them almost as found.

What makes them unusual is the yards. Three survive — Iliffe, Peacock and Clements — narrow cobbled cul-de-sacs of low workshops running off the back of the flats, built so that a tenant could live upstairs and work downstairs. The brick is soot-dark. The doorways are wooden and hand-painted. Frame a shot down one of them and the twentieth century mostly disappears on its own.

The yards were nearly demolished in the 1970s and were saved by a long residents' campaign. They now house working craftspeople — furniture makers, ceramicists, jewellers — and open their doors to the public several weekends a year.

Walk in from Crampton Street and stop at the mouth of Iliffe Yard. Look at the join where the tenement block meets the workshop range: two different kinds of Victorian ambition, stacked. Allied used this place because it required nothing, which is another way of saying that Walworth has been quietly keeping a piece of 1940s London alive for eighty years without being asked to.