Behind the Scenes at Downton Abbey (15 page)

London isn’t the only city that offered music and fun. In series four Lady Rose, in an unlikely trio with Anna and Jimmy, finds a dance hall in nearby York. Although a less fashionable setting than its London counterparts, such a venue would have been popular with local servants and farmworkers, who would have attended afternoon tea dances in their best off-duty outfits.

In reality, this location is miles away from Yorkshire. Hoxton Hall, a nineteenth-century dance hall located in East London’s Hackney, was chosen for its period columns, flooring and fire mantels. The exterior was filmed at historic dockyards in Chatham, Kent.

The high-society version of such a club would have been rather different, as scenes at the Lotus Club, frequented by the Crawleys, show overleaf. The location for that venue was the sumptuous ballroom of the Savile Club, a gentleman’s club in London’s ritzy Mayfair. Still, Rose is happy to be at either venue; at heart the attractions are the same: music and dancing.

Downton Abbey
demands an enormous number of props to dress the sets and create the feel of the 1920s. But while the Abbey may be modernising – slowly – the props team are not replacing the old with the new.

‘With design, there is one school of thought that says that if a show is set in 1922, there should be nothing in the house from before that date. It creates a look like the set of some Bertie Wooster musical, whereas real life isn’t like that,’ says Julian Fellowes. ‘You also have all the things in a house that the family already posess.’ So when the props team bring in items to dress the rooms at Highclere, for example, they may add pieces of art or furniture that look as if they were acquired by its residents decades, if not centuries, ago to give a sense of heritage.

A set may demand more contemporary items – for example in Gregson’s London flat the art department are conscious that they need to place the location precisely within its time.

By 1925 the term Art Deco had been coined, and by 1928 the building of the iconic Chrysler Building – the pinnacle of that design movement – had begun in New York. But in series four, all this is yet to come. ‘With her costumes, Caroline [McCall] is ahead of us in terms of design,’ says Donal Woods, the production designer. ‘After the war nothing really happened until 1925, when the French exhibition in Paris marked the explosion of Art Deco. Fashion was taking off, but in terms of furniture, design, colours, wallpapers and fabrics it was pretty staid from 1914. We are slowly edging towards a slightly brighter world, but it’s a gradual process.’

The key people working for Woods in the props team are the set decorator Gina Cromwell, who is responsible for the detail on set, and the buyer, Sue Morrison, who obtains the necessary items. In terms of sourcing period props, many items are bought, as they are used repeatedly, and kept in the department’s vast garage-like store at Ealing. Traditional and antique markets at Kempton Park, Petworth, Dorking and Lincoln, are a useful resource from which they can build up stock.

Online auctions are another source, which are used more and more, albeit with a health warning attached, says Cromwell. ‘Personally, I like to see things before I commit to buying them, just because you get a better sense of their size and quality. I have bought things on eBay, but there’s a slight risk involved in buying unseen.’

The prop department can also hire items, if necessary. ‘We’re very lucky in England because we have prophouses, terrific resources that have been built up over years,’ says Cromwell. ‘They’re big warehouses in London largely, and we can hire from them for a short period.’

Many items are created in-house by the art department and the specialist prop makers. Such items can include anything from period product labels, menus and newspapers to everything the Crawleys sit down to eat.

The Crawleys dine in fine style, thanks to food economist Lisa Heathcote, who is responsible for what they eat on screen. ‘It’s about food and art; I am the hair and make-up person for food,’ she laughs.

As delicious as they look, you might not want to eat some of her creations, given her necessary tweaks to them to ensure they last through long hours of filming. A beautiful cake might have a polystyrene base; what looks like whipped cream is likely a sturdier pudding mix, while some dishes are so heavily glazed they are ‘solid as a rock!’ Here, Twenties food trends come in handy, notes Heathcote. ‘They used lots of gelatine and aspic, but I don’t make it soft, I make it like concrete. You could technically eat it, but it wouldn’t be very nice.’

Heathcote avoids any particularly sugary dishes because they don’t last under the hot lights, which was partly why Mary and Edith’s ornate wedding cakes were made by specialist modelmakers. Heathcote explains: ‘Wedding cakes are fragile things and don’t like changes of temperature and being moved a lot, all of which can happen on a film set.’

Vast quantities of food are required to refresh plates for repeated takes. If the Crawleys have lamb chops, says Heathcote, ‘I’ll probably cook 80, because they’ll have to eat them and push them around the plate, and then they start to look a bit sad.’ Slicing into huge hunks of meat is avoided, she adds: ‘Once you start carving joints, you create problems, because you’ve got to think about how many times you’re going to be doing something.’