A digital heritage project providing a virtual tour of the former BBC Elstree Centre has gone live, enabling online visitors to explore the now demolished production facility.
Led by Howard Berry, reader in film heritage practice at the University of Hertfordshire, the Elstree Project recorded more than 400 high resolution 360° panoramic images throughout the Fairbanks Building and Neptune House last year. Additionally, a multidisciplinary team from the University conducted LiDAR scans of Stages C and D.
The spaces have been virtually reconstructed as part of an immersive, interactive tour, available free at the Elstree Project website. Visitors are able to move through studio stages, dressing rooms, offices, technical facilities, galleries, sound-mixing rooms and more, including areas of the former Holby City sets. The site was associated with film production, as well as ATV and the BBC, producing programme output including The Muppet Show, Top of the Pops and Grange Hill.
It is believed the project marks the first time a British film or TV studio has been captured for an immersive experience.
Project leader Berry commented, “The Elstree Project has spent many years recording the memories of the people who worked in Britain’s film and television studios. With this project we have been able to preserve the spaces themselves. Once a studio building is demolished, photographs and plans can tell us a great deal, but they cannot fully communicate what it was like to move through that environment—the relationship between a stage, its galleries, dressing rooms, corridors, technical areas and all the other spaces that allowed a television programme to be made.
“By combining 360° photography with LiDAR scanning, we have created a permanent spatial record. In the case of Stage D, the physical studio may have disappeared, but we now have the data needed to reconstruct that space and allow people to experience it again in VR. For me, that opens up some very exciting possibilities for the future preservation of film and television heritage.”
The recording was completed in collaboration with Oxygen Studios, which provided extensive access to the site prior to its demolition. Complementing an extensive oral history work featuring memories of people who worked there, the Elstree Project aims to preserve the physical environments in which the memories were made.
