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Location Location

Now one is in fashion world, making a retrospective about creative genius in design studio and boardroom. It’s the usual blend of talking heads and archive, which has meant finding a number of interesting locations, north and south.

Everyone wants then same thing – glass and steel apartments, stark and minimalist, for the younger spokesperson, crumbly palazzo for the older generation.  They have enough room for the big wide on the A Camera, an interesting background for the 85mm profile on B. The broadcaster wants it looking British, the production company wants it looking chic and the PM wants it for nowt and three angles, three interviews please, per day.

I want glass walls and a view of Soho rooftops, but it ain’t easy. Most of what looks great online is owned by someone with an agent, or a Georgian townhouse with scaffolders just arrived outside. Friends with lovely homes have already been tapped for previous shoots. One’s own drum has been in so many films it’s looking tired.

And at the last minute, this: the top floor of Salts Mill in Bradford, a vast pile that once hummed to the clack of looms, but now sits majestically, awaiting further instructions. Two floors down it’s all art centre and organic cafe, but when the walls and floors are five feet thick, the hiss of espresso being expressed goes unheard. Walking in you experience Cathedral Gasp, the sudden uplift of the spirit induced by scale. Also a lust to capture all of it, to revel in the gone, the resonance of things post-industrial. And as ever, with acres of floor space to play in, we end up boxed in a corner, tripping over cables and knocking into C stands, kralled-up like a pioneer wagon train, looking out at the vacant chair, waiting for talent.