North London Food & Culture

What was the Creature Shop of Camden Lock?

It played a major role in building movie monsters of all kinds - despite the advances of the virtual ones, says Tom Kihl

In the late 1970s, The Muppets were the toast of Saturday night TV while Hollywood blockbusters were bristling with realistic aliens, monsters and other animatronic creations. Growing up at the time, these big and small screen essentials felt like American cultural imports, but the reality was that much of the production was taking place in North London.

Chief Muppeteer Jim Henson fell in love with this part of the world and moved into a large house on Hampstead’s Downshire Hill in the mid-70s. After the success of Sesame Street, he was increasingly drawing a distinction between his famous cuddly and cartoon-like Muppet ‘monsters’, with a growing interest in making the sort of beasts that could be mistaken for real – if fantastically exaggerated – creatures.


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He set up Jim Henson’s Creature Shop as a separate entity from his well-established Muppet Workshop in New York, and plumped for a highly convenient spot just down the Hill from his place in Hampstead at 1b, the building presently home to the Keats Group NHS doctors practice. Although this meant an easy commute à pied each morning for Jim, the smell of latex and sounds of industrial moulding work was not such a hit with the other neighbours.

With production in progress on a menagerie of creatures for his movie The Dark Crystal, the company found an altogether more suitable location: a large, Victorian industrial warehouse in deepest Camden Town at 30 Oval Road, adjacent to Regent’s Canal.

The new base couldn’t have been more different to the leafy mansions of Downshire Hill. As part of the faded Gilbey’s Goods Yard area, with waterway and rail profits long gone, it was a crumbling, largely forgotten industrial corner of the city, with an early Camden Lock Market the only hint at any sign of local regeneration.

The building had previously been used as railway offices and sporadically developed over the decades, including construction of a locomotive engine house and most impressively, a series of vaults beneath, dating from 1837, that once provided goods sidings, engine repair workshops and horse stables. All strangely apt, if unintentional, forerunners for the kind of creature work that was to follow.

At one point, around 400 horses worked in the Goods Yard, and the warrens of horse tunnels ran from here right up the length of Chalk Farm Road to the Roundhouse. In this aerial shot from 1921, the era of the engines above ground is more apparent. You’ll see 30 Oval Road just up from the distinctive rotunda of Collard and Collard’s piano factory, amidst the bustle of the sidings.

Sixty years on, the Creature Shop retained a strangely strong sense of lineage with the area’s famous lost local piano industry too, the specialist workshops that managed all the polishing, stringing, glue-boiling, lead weighting replaced with the equally technical and psychical tasks of ensuring a monster’s eyebrows move convincingly – or dragon’s jaws snap.

As well as ensuring there was a permanent team in place to work his own fantasy movie productions, Henson’s Creature Shop also started to accept commissions, and the tenure in Oval Road saw the building become a powerful special effects production house for the global movie industry.

Traditional puppetry was rapidly morphing into radio-controlled animatronics and colourful fur making way for altogether more fleshy, hairy or slimey creations, all being born in the industrial backwaters of NW1.

Star Wars director George Lucas was also working in the UK and wanted Henson to play his new character, Yoda, and though Jim ultimately declined, Creature Shop advice, puppeteers and technology were all hugely influential on the development of the iconic little green sage.

As a young Jedi fan, I was fortunate enough to visit the set of The Empire Strikes Back on the day they were shooting the swamp scenes where Yoda is introduced. I was blown away by how convincingly he could be controlled using a flat aluminium plate. They even let us wiggle his ears. It all felt incredibly advanced, just before the dawn of the game-changing CGI era that was to inevitably follow.

The Camden Creature Shop continued to play a major role in building movie monsters of all kinds despite the advances of the virtual ones, and even with Henson’s sudden death in 1990 the Shop remained active in the location until 1995, working on more recent hits like farmyard tale Babe and the first Harry Potter film.

The building has since largely been demolished, but a semi-sympathetic redevelopment into luxury apartments, named simply The Henson, is now complete. Retaining key parts of the Victorian exterior, this was much less destructive than the arrival of the nearby Morrison’s superstore and social housing, which involved the loss of many original arches and horse tunnels.

Instead, these historic features in this latest wave of reclamation, reuse and redevelopment in the area have been turned into swathes of yet-to-be-occupied office space. But which creatures will take up residence in the wake of the horses, the engines, the furry aliens and animatronic eyebrows as the Oval Road vaults and warehouses enter their next era?


2 thoughts on “What was the Creature Shop of Camden Lock?”

  1. Jim used to rent my parents flat in Grafton road in the 80’s when they moved abroad – can remember as a kid going round there to visit and he had lots of models of the caves in the swamp scenes made out of plasticine in the back study, he also looked after my gerbils for me and built them an amazing gerbil run, funny had forgotten all about it till I read your article

  2. Hi, I was the development surveyor employee of the owner of 30 Oval Road back in the early 90s. I managed the building and leased the space to Hensons. Jim had died but I met Brian, a very nice guy and all the team with the company. I remember a telephone call around 92 asking if they could borrow the empty floor above to ‘walk the elephant’ they built for the Flint Stones movie, agreed of course. I think they bought the building eventually with some involvement or help from Richard Curtis, who was filming Four Weddings at the time … Mike

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2 thoughts on “What was the Creature Shop of Camden Lock?”

  1. Jim used to rent my parents flat in Grafton road in the 80’s when they moved abroad – can remember as a kid going round there to visit and he had lots of models of the caves in the swamp scenes made out of plasticine in the back study, he also looked after my gerbils for me and built them an amazing gerbil run, funny had forgotten all about it till I read your article

  2. Hi, I was the development surveyor employee of the owner of 30 Oval Road back in the early 90s. I managed the building and leased the space to Hensons. Jim had died but I met Brian, a very nice guy and all the team with the company. I remember a telephone call around 92 asking if they could borrow the empty floor above to ‘walk the elephant’ they built for the Flint Stones movie, agreed of course. I think they bought the building eventually with some involvement or help from Richard Curtis, who was filming Four Weddings at the time … Mike

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