The African Queen | Worton Hall, Isleworth — where the leeches were rubber

The leeches are the scene everyone remembers: Bogart hauling the boat through the reeds by hand, coming up out of the water covered in them. They were rubber, and they were applied in a tank in west London.

Worton Hall opened as a film studio on Worton Road in Isleworth in July 1914 and closed in 1952, which makes The African Queen close to the last thing produced there. Roughly half the finished film is Isleworth. Every shot in which Bogart and Hepburn are actually in the water was done in the studio tanks — the real thing was judged too dangerous in Africa — and the German fort at Shona was built on the lot from tubular scaffolding under plaster.

The stages are gone. The house is not. Worton Hall itself, the stuccoed mid-nineteenth-century villa the studio grew around, still stands on Worton Road, Grade II listed, converted to flats, with an industrial estate occupying the ground where the sets went up.

Walk up Worton Road past the Royal Oak on an ordinary weekday morning. Nothing announces any of it. A film remembered for being shot in the jungle was, for half its running time, shot behind these walls.

Photo: Worton Road, Isleworth, via Wikimedia Commons (geograph.org.uk).