The film which features the tower most prominently is Paul WS Anderson’s 1994 Shopping. Over incessant pulsing trance-techno we are introduced to a dark post-industrial city of blast furnaces and hollow factories, centred around a dilapidated tower block and its gang of teenage residents who indulge in joyriding and ram-raiding. Making his debut leading role, Jude Law plays the nihilistic Billy, all leather jacket and reckless charm, released from prison and soon back to his life of aimless rebellion.
The first we see of Balfron is a slow pan up as Billy walks along the podium walkway, under a makeshift scaffolded entranceway with hung red lamps, and further up as the tower comes in to view, its geometric pattern of flats behind the horizontal ladder frame, and further up to the three bright rooftop downlights. He arrives at a dimly-lit tiled corridor and an iron-gated down-flat where he used to live.
We return to the tower repeatedly, either thick in mist or the dark of night, filled by young gangs wielding baseball bats and Molotov cocktails who skulk around corrugated iron walls, contorted street lamps and the carcasses of police cars. Sean Bean arrives for a brief cameo in a black Mercedes, thick striped suit and jewellery, and pulls into the underground car park lit only from street light filtering in through coffered ceiling. ‘Look at this place,’ he mutters to his driver. 'How do people live in this filth?’ He walks along a ground floor corridor completely blanketed in graffiti, ‘This whole estate’s a disgrace’.
In an oral history interview, a resident explained that during the filming of Shopping, corridor and car park lights were turned off for long periods. The set designers added props to make the tower seem grim; putting scaffolding up along the walkway leading to the tower, cladding it in corrugated iron and spraying it with graffiti; leaving an abandoned cars strewn around the estate; replacing functioning lamp-posts with broken, bent versions. When the film crew left, they repainted the fencing and restored everything else but they forgot to replace the lamp post which remained, bent and unfunctioning, for a further week.
The film which features the tower most prominently is Paul WS Anderson’s 1994 Shopping. Over incessant pulsing trance-techno we are introduced to a dark post-industrial city of blast furnaces and hollow factories, centred around a dilapidated tower block and its gang of teenage residents who indulge in joyriding and ram-raiding. Making his debut leading role, Jude Law plays the nihilistic Billy, all leather jacket and reckless charm, released from prison and soon back to his life of aimless rebellion.
The first we see of Balfron is a slow pan up as Billy walks along the podium walkway, under a makeshift scaffolded entranceway with hung red lamps, and further up as the tower comes in to view, its geometric pattern of flats behind the horizontal ladder frame, and further up to the three bright rooftop downlights. He arrives at a dimly-lit tiled corridor and an iron-gated down-flat where he used to live.
We return to the tower repeatedly, either thick in mist or the dark of night, filled by young gangs wielding baseball bats and Molotov cocktails who skulk around corrugated iron walls, contorted street lamps and the carcasses of police cars. Sean Bean arrives for a brief cameo in a black Mercedes, thick striped suit and jewellery, and pulls into the underground car park lit only from street light filtering in through coffered ceiling. ‘Look at this place,’ he mutters to his driver. 'How do people live in this filth?’ He walks along a ground floor corridor completely blanketed in graffiti, ‘This whole estate’s a disgrace’.
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In an oral history interview, a resident explained that during the filming of Shopping, corridor and car park lights were turned off for long periods. The set designers added props to make the tower seem grim; putting scaffolding up along the walkway leading to the tower, cladding it in corrugated iron and spraying it with graffiti; leaving an abandoned cars strewn around the estate; replacing functioning lamp-posts with broken, bent versions. When the film crew left, they repainted the fencing and restored everything else but they forgot to replace the lamp post which remained, bent and unfunctioning, for a further week.