Walk on the wild side
QUESTION
Do any of the buildings featured in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange still exist? Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel was set in a dystopian London of the near future and tells the story of Alex DeLarge, a sadistic young man with a passion for Beethoven who leads his gang of ‘ droogs’ on nightly sprees of ‘ultra-violence’.
Kubrick’s 1971 film adaptation starred Malcolm McDowell as Alex and demonstrated all the director’s famous attention to detail, not least in his selection of film locations.
While Alex’s nights are spent committing ultra-violence, an early scene finds him perusing a record store in search of ‘lovely, lovely, Beethoven’ records.
the record store was in the former Chelsea Drugstore, a modern glass and aluminium-fronted building on the northwest corner of Royal Avenue and the Kings Road, in West London. the building is still there, now home to a McDonald’s.
to realise Burgess’s bleak futuristic vision, Stanley Kubrick turned to the Brutalist architecture spreading across London in the Sixties and Seventies.
the interior of Alex’s apartment, Municipal Flat Block 18a, is on the top floor of Canterbury house tower block , Borehamwood, herts. An exterior blue plaque and mosaic at ground level com - memorate the film’s location. the exterior of the house is at t avy Bridge Centre, thamesmead South, London SE2.
Some of the most disturbing scenes in the film were filmed around thamesmead South. Built primarily in the mid-Sixties, it was promoted as the ‘town of the 21st century’, but is now regarded as a concrete catastrophe.
the artificial Southmere lake, thames - mead, doubles as the Flat Block Marina. An old tramp is attacked under a walkway by the shopping centre and, to assert his authority, Alex dumps his fellow droogs into the water beside Binsey Walk.
the exterior home of the writer , site of the film’s notorious rape scene, was Milton Grundy’s Japanese garden in Shipton-under-Wychwood, oxfordshire, and the interior was Skybreak (now Jaffe house) in Radlett, hertfordshire. Skybreak was the iconic Sixties house designed by t eam 4: Su Brumwell, Wendy Cheeseman, norman Foster and Richard Rogers.
Kurt Rowe, London E11. I’VE been collating all films and TV shows shot at Brunel University , London, for several years and have become the university’s unofficial archivist. Kubrick’s A Clockwork orange is the most famous film linked with the university.
hawk Films and Kubrick arrived on September 10, 1970, and remained on campus for ten days. Four buildings were used, which still exist, for various scenes.
the ground floor main entrance in tower D was used for the vandalised lift and staircase scenes of the block where Alex lived with his parents — Municipal Flat Block 18A Linear north.
the ground floor entrance lobby in the John Crank building was the setting for the reception centre of the Ludovico Institute. Alex’s bedroom scenes at the Ludovico Institute used two different rooms in Chepstow halls of residence: h34 and h36. the famous scene in which Alex undergoes his aversion therapy was filmed in Lecture theatre E, Lecture Centre.
As a 16-year-old in 1970, in my job at the university, I had to operate the cine pro - jector during the aversion therapy scenes. I knew little about K ubrick at the time; the only film I knew of his was 2001: A Space odyssey. Little did I realise I was witnessing a master at work! John Bates, media technician,
Brunel University, London.
QUESTION
Is it true that men and women see the colour red differently (making lipstick shade irrelevant)?
THE structure of our eyes focuses on light, as a camera lens focuses light onto film, and colour is the code an eye generates when a spectrum of light hits it.
Light does not have colour but can make colour when it hits the eye, and studies have shown male and females can perceive colours differently. the retina is the lightsensitive lining of the eyeball and this membrane contains cells called rods and cones. Retinal rods are sensitive to dim light but not to colour, while cone-shaped cells are the ones sensitive to colour and bright light: rods allow us to see shapes and cones allow us to see colour.
Although eight per cent of men and one per cent of women have some form of colour impairment, research shows women to have more cones than men, and men ’s eyes to have more rods.
this makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint. In hunter -gatherer societies men would be hunting, requiring eyes well equipped to detect movement. Men with fewer rods couldn’t discern shapes quickly and so likely died early , while men with more rods lived to pass on their genes.
Women would have dealt more with gathering food such as berries, needing a good ability to detect colours — especially discerning the difference between all ‘red’ berries. the difference could be a nutritious meal or poisoning your family. As such, women with better colour vision lived longer to pass on their genes.
Both males and females can perceive more variations in ‘warmer’ colours than ‘cooler’ ones because two -thirds of cone cells process longer light wavelengths (red, orange and yellow).
they stimulate emotions and motivate, and red in particular is attention-grabbing and aggressive. So different shades of lipstick are less significant through a man’s eyes to some extent but the redness still attracts their attention.
From rose petal to strawberry, some males see red lips as a reflection of confidence and beauty. Women wearing red lipstick receive the most prolonged gazes from men.
Emilie Lamplough, trowbridge, Wiltshire.