Lights, cameras, shhhh.... It seems too quiet at Scott Brownrigg’s Shinfield Studios near Reading, but that’s just what these mega film stages need
Aside from the background white noise of M4 traffic from the north, there’s an almost eerie silence at Shinfield Studios outside Reading. This quietude is especially strange since the new film and TV complex is huge – the UK’s largest newbuild.
But first to the context. Domestic film-making history is a long one, starting with Ealing Studios in 1902 and burgeoning with Shepperton and Pinewood in the 1930s – and it’s ongoing. Government tax credits make the industry highly competitive internationally, and with the cultural shift from traditional movie studios and cinemas to new generators of online film and TV content like Netflix, Disney+ and Apple TV, global appetite for entertainment is growing exponentially.
The BFI’s 2020-21 audit put UK film industry turnover at nearly £21bn, with high-end TV (HETV) online production increasing by 265% in the same period. This has resulted in a new generation of facilities around London to feed demand: Sky Studios in Elstree, Longcross in Surrey and the ongoing expansion of Warner Bros Studios at Leavesden in Hertfordshire. A recent Knight Frank report cited the development of 1 million ft² of new stage space in 2023, with a further 2.6 million ft² needed by 2028.
Scott Brownrigg’s Shinfield Studios, owned by US independent film and TV studio platform Shadowbox Studios, takes the UK 1 million ft² nearer to realising that aspiration. Set on a greenfield site just east of the Berkshire village of Shinfield, the £250 million facility has 18 state-of-the-art stages, with two of them – at 43,000ft² each – being the largest fully sound-proofed and air-conditioned in the country – along with 38 support workshops, 130,000ft² of admin offices, nine-acre filming backlot/parking and a social ‘hub’ building. Perhaps I’ve just hit a hiatus between the latest Ghostbusters movie and the latest streaming craze, but wandering the deserted service zones between huge sheds, the quiet is as notable as the scale.
You might think that a massive development such as this would have caused rancour in the local community and resistance from planners, but it didn’t. While Shadowbox was sourcing financial backers, it engaged Scott Brownrigg in 2017 as consultant to help it find a site close to the capital, where most freelance film technicians and post-production facilities are based. ‘We needed a certain space quantum – about 60-65 acres – and there weren’t many sites that big in the London area,’ recalls Scott Brownrigg director Jason Lebidineuse, adding that it came down to a toss-up between a site in Borehamwood and here. Two things clinched it: ‘Not only was it not on greenbelt land but we had previously gained outline planning permission at Shinfield with freeholder Reading University for a proposed science park, which in the end was only partly built out,’ he explains. ‘Since we weren’t starting from zero, we could put forward a new proposal for the site more quickly. That was good for Shadowbox, which was keen to hit the ground running.
Between 2018 and 2021 the architect and client team worked with a ‘very supportive’ Wokingham Council and liaised with local groups to progress the proposal – the latter were very open to an idea on this scale. ‘What the community didn’t want was another housing estate putting more strain on local roads and services,’ says Lebidineuse – although meetings were as much about what they did want. ‘To bring jobs into the area in the creative industries was a real plus for the them, as was outreach potential – not just to Reading University’s film media faculty but to local schools as well.’
What’s striking about the planning process was the amount of support for the proposal, not only from Shinfield Parish Council, Berkshire Local Enterprise Partnership and Reading’s FE technical college, but letters from individuals keen to have a say on a development that might affect their kids’ future careers. This helped the scheme gain permission in December 2021. Part of its Section106 agreement was a new 80-seater cinema/community hub that has just opened in the village. Dean Horne, Shinfield Studio’s head of studio operations, says 70% of his site staff live in the area. The village, it seems, has not only been put on the map, it’s feeling the benefits.
What was striking in the planning process was the level of support for the proposal
Huge, but sitting benignly the landscape, it’s curious that all that magic happens in a place that looks so like a distribution centre; although Scott Brownrigg has made moves to ameliorate this. Lebidineuse states that a ’picturesque’ placement of buildings is at play, which sees taller, 18m-high stages placed towards the centre, with lower ones and workshop spaces grading down to the periphery of the site and also serving as an effective sound buffer for the M4 motorway beyond them.
With the conversion of more than 9ha of greenfield land to hard surfacing, the drainage strategy was crucial to a high-worth film industry where a flooding ‘down-day’ is not an option. The architect keyed into natural falls across the site and existing ditches – one bisecting the development and one on its east boundary. This obviated a need for balancing ponds but with level thresholds aside stage zones, surface drains feed into 4500m3 of below-ground cellular or tubular attenuation tanks to mitigate potential high volumes of surface water run-off.
On the south side, and to animate the campus, are the studios’ admin offices, with their bold brises-soleil, at the entrance of the site. Their two wings flank a large portico that leads to the stages beyond, its deep inner face lined in bright yellow steel panels, which Lebidineuse concedes would have been more Hollywood if the D&B contract had not seen the proposed high-resolution LED screens value-engineered out.
Ghostbusters was filmed here while 500 people were busy constructing stages round it
Beyond this, the site is characterised by huge aluminium-clad steel sheds, with stages numbered in satisfying gargantuan yellow, though they are otherwise subtly coloured in anthracite grey to help it meld into the landscape. Stages address each other across an access road sandwiched between 7m-wide aprons for the requisite A-lister Winnebago, trucks or generators. All can plug into the low stage ancillary blocks facing the aprons, with 2100amp power kit, toilet blocks and air conditioning plant. This is high volume/low feed, to deal with heat gain from thousands of LED lights or to maintain a constant 20ºC, while also being quiet enough not to affect a working set.
Stages, with their fine poured screed floors, range from 1600m² to 4000m². The latter, at around 78m by 51m by 15m high, seems vast when empty, allowing you to read its 6.3m-centre grid of 4m- deep steel trusses, which incorporate a high-level gantry, allowing crew to access small, transversal runway beams at 2m centres, supporting lighting rigs and sets. But there is also that uncanny absence of echo for spaces so big – largely down to the duvet-like acoustic blankets on internal walls. Some are made by Insul-Quilts, a 70-year-old LA firm – naturally – a non-reverberant Lebidineuse describes as ‘the industry standard’.
An accelerated build programme demanded rapid block completion as well as bringing stages into use even as others were going up (80,000ft2 of space was built in six months), so their 800mm-thick walls were built in two phases. ‘The steel frame went up first, then we made a weather line of the “external” side of the internal skin,’ the architect explains. ‘This meant internal linings could be completed by one sub-contractor as the external skin was built by another.’ Obviously, stages are as much about stopping noise getting in as out. Ghostbusters was being filmed in a stage here while 500 people were busy constructing the ones round it.
So we return to that quirky silence. Nick Durup, director at acoustic consultant Sharps Redmore, notes that while mineral wool, with its acoustic, thermal and fire properties, was used throughout, the number of plasterboard layers for sound intrusion depended on whether it was in a wall facing a motorway or field, in a roof or party wall build-up. If it seems odd to make such complex specifications, Durup says it yielded enough material and programme savings over the site to make it worth doing. The onerous NR25 rating specification that it meets ranks this complex with a concert hall. ‘It’s a very low level of sound,’ emphasises Durup, ‘equating to about 30dBA, which is how the human ear would perceive it. Think of the level you’d want in a bedroom at night – quite something considering the location’.
No noise problems from Shinfield’s blockbuster neighbour then; just something huge and quiet in the distance, like Norma Desmond’s memories of her silent films in ‘Sunset Boulevard’. ‘You used to be big,’ says the movie’s cunning but ultimately doomed screenwriter on first meeting her. ‘I AM big,’ the spurned star retorts. ‘It’s the pictures that got small.’
In numbers
Construction cost £250m
Sound stages 18
Workshops 38
Sound stage areas 17,000-43,000ft²
Office space 130,000ft²
Credits
Architect, principal designer & CDM co-ordinator Scott Brownrigg
Client Shinfield Studios
Structural engineer Sweco
M&E consultant AWA
QS Stace
Main contractor Curo Construction and Life Build
IT Hoare Lea
Acoustic consultant Sharps Redmore
Landscape consultant Stantec
Project manager Bidwells
Approved building inspector Bureau Veritas