Back in the pictures Revamp brings ailing Ealing Studios into 21st century

The first time filmmaker Barnaby Thompson visited Ealing Studios it was to shoot Victoria Beckham, who at the time was better known globally as Posh Spice, being unceremoniously plunged underwater.

- Mark Sweney

"It was 1997, we were making Spice World and there was a sequence where Posh Spice got thrown into the Thames," says Thompson, 65, whose film credits include Wayne's World, the remake of St Trinian's and an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband. "We have a tank at Ealing so we shot Posh being thrown into the tank. It was the first time I had been on that hallowed ground."

Nearly three decades on, the film director is a co-owner of the studios and is about to raise the curtain on its biggest revamp in 80 years.

Thompson has something of an obsession with the west London site, which was founded in 1902 and is the world's oldest continuously working film studio. Three years after Beckham's dip, he jumped at the chance to form part of a consortium to buy the storied complex for a reported £10m.

Between the late 1930s and mid-50s, the studio produced famous Ealing comedies such as The Lavender Hill Mob, and postwar hits including The Ladykillers and Kind Hearts and Coronets.

Under subsequent BBC ownership, classics including Porridge, Monty Python and Doctor Who were shot there. But by 2000, when Thompson took over in concert with the Manhattan Loft Corporation, the property group behind the Chiltern Firehouse and St Pancras Renaissance hotels, the ageing studios were struggling to compete against modern rivals.

"I grew up with the Ealing movies; it was a fabulous fantasy to own the studio," he says. "Then one thing after another happened and suddenly we owned it. The place was charming but somewhat dilapidated. It needed to be modernised and brought into the 21st century. No one had spent any money on it since the war."