The horrors of Rillington Place: behind the scenes of a new BBC serial killer drama filmed in Scotland

Continuing along the hall, the next door reveals a small sitting room. There’s a threadbare rug on dusty wooden floorboards. A black and white photograph and clutch of medical certificates hang among the torn and peeling wallpaper. A single thought resonates in my mind: something bad happened here.

Welcome to 10 Rillington Place. It was here that one of Britain’s most infamous serial killers, John Reginald Christie, murdered at least eight women – including his wife Ethel – during the 1940s and 50s.

Posing as a backstreet abortionist, Christie preyed on vulnerable women, inviting victims to his flat where they were tricked into inhaling deadly carbon monoxide gas. Once unconscious, Christie would rape and strangle them.

Afterwards, he would dispose of their bodies: under the floorboards, in the back garden, in an outside washhouse and in a sealed-off kitchen alcove. Such was his apparent nonchalance, Christie reportedly even used the thigh bone of one woman to prop up his garden fence.

This isn’t the real Rillington Place, of course – the actual building in the Ladbroke Grove area of London has long since been demolished due to its grisly reputation – but rather I’m on the Dumbarton set where a BBC drama charting Christie’s horrific crimes was filmed.

The three-part series will see Tim Roth, star of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, play Christie with Samantha Morton, known for her roles in Morvern Callar and Minority Report, as his wife Ethel.

Production designer Pat Campbell on the set of BBC drama Rillington Place in Dumbarton. Picture: Colin Mearns/Newsquest Herald & Times

Today, the cast are off filming at Bo’ness and Kinneil Railway so the hangar-like space – just across the lot from where BBC Scotland’s River City is filmed – is eerily quiet save for myself and production designer Pat Campbell.

Leaning casually against the sink, Glasgow-born Campbell is giving me the lowdown on what it takes to recreate a serial killer’s lair. “We knew it had to be dingy, morbid and sinister,” she says. “But what I didn’t want to do was end up filming in grey rooms and it was about trying to get some colour and life into that.”

Creating that vibe required meticulous research. Campbell began by studying police photography taken at the time. “There is a lot of information about what there was in his house and quite a few stills that the police took when they came to investigate,” she says. “There was a series of black and white photographs that proved useful.”

Christie’s sordid life was previously dramatised in the 1971 film 10 Rillington Place starring Richard Attenborough alongside John Hurt and Judy Geeson.

“The original film was a huge help,” says Campbell. “You research everything you can about the period, the person and any images that are available. Because this is factual there are photographs of the street, plans of the house, police stills – there is a good bank of work.

“We went down to London to try to find where Rillington Place was. There is nothing left, but it did give a feeling of the area surrounding him.”

Key pieces were sourced from prop houses, architectural salvage yards and antiques shops to help dress and decorate the set. Although this, as Campbell admits, was not without its challenges.

“We are talking about 1938 until 1950-something so it is a difficult period and there’s not an enormous amount of stock.”

Equally, she was aware of not wanting items to appear too new or state-of-the-art for December 1938 when Christie and his wife moved into their ground floor flat at Rillington Place. “Things shouldn’t be 1938 – they should be 1930,” says Campbell.

“Back then people kept things for much longer. Then there were the war years when nobody had anything, there was rationing and you had to make do with what you had. The 1950s was another poor period. So, it was about trying to make the sets interesting within those constraints.”

The BBC drama will focus on two of Christie’s victims, Beryl Evans and her one-year-old daughter Geraldine, who moved into the top-floor flat of 10 Rillington Place in 1948.

The storyline examines how Christie framed Beryl’s husband Timothy Evans for the murders. Evans, apparently coerced into giving a false confession, was hanged in 1950.

It took another three years for Christie to be arrested. By then, he had killed four more women, including his wife Ethel, who he strangled in bed. Christie was convicted and hanged in 1953, aged 54.

More than simply supplying tone and context, the set is almost like another character in the show. “You look at the requirements of the house interior and on this one the layout is important,” says Campbell, referring to the locations in which the bodies would be concealed.

“You couldn’t take that layout and change it. What we did do was enlarge the house by about 25 per cent because it was tiny. “Even though we are in a studio, you still want space to shoot without always taking the walls out. We did split the level – as the house was – because that allowed us to lift the floorboards in the sitting room for when he puts Ethel underneath there.”

Campbell taps one of the kitchen walls. “There is a cupboard behind there,” she says. “That’s where he put some of the bodies. It was wallpapered over and inside were three poor women.”

In the sitting room, she gestures to the wooden boards beneath our feet. “His wife Ethel was put under here,” she says. “We see him dropping her in and sealing it up. Then the police come and pull up the boards again after he was arrested.”

My gaze wanders to the framed certificates on the wall. “That’s him – he did have those,” says Campbell. “Christie would tell people he was a doctor and had worked for St John’s Ambulance service. He had a very high opinion of himself and exaggerated everything.”

Rillington Place has been filmed on location across Scotland, including Paisley, Bo’ness and Glasgow. “We shot at the Western Baths swimming pool [in the west end of the city],” says Campbell. “Another day we were down at West Princes Street filming and at West Street using that as the link between Rillington Place and the rest of Ladbroke Grove.

“We used a factory in Bo’ness that we turned into a bombed-out section of the factory at the end of their street. We had to build huge polystyrene blackened beams, a crumbling porch and filled it with smoke and rubble. It was good to be out and about getting a breath of fresh air because after three weeks on this set it can feel quite claustrophobic. You could feel the mood of everyone coming down.”

Drymen-based Campbell, who studied at Glasgow School of Art, designed the original River City set back in 2001-02. Over the past 35 years she has worked on a raft of films and TV shows including mostly recently What We Did On Our Holiday, starring David Tennant, Rosamund Pike and Billy Connolly, and BBC series Wolf Hall, set in Tudor times.

Tim Roth as John Christie in BBC drama Rillington Place. Picture: Des Willie/BBC

Spotting errors in historical dramas has become something of a national sport – certainly among some social media users. In 2014, producers of Downton Abbey were left red-faced after a plastic water bottle appeared in a promotional photograph.

A BBC adaptation of Philippa Gregory’s bestselling novel The White Queen – set in 1464 during the Wars of the Roses – was lambasted for costumes with zips that were not invented until 19th century alongside viewers spotting double-glazing, modern guttering and concrete steps in the background of scenes.

Does this kind of thing weigh on Campbell’s mind? “Of course, you think about that all the time but there are things that simply don’t exist from 1933 any more,” she says. “You do your best. Then there are other things that you think: ‘I love that, I know it’s not period, but I think we will get away with it because it has a certain flavour to it …’ and so you take the chance.

“I think the public loves spotting those things,” she smiles. “Is our red [London] bus right? Well, it isn’t actually, before anyone writes in. It was from the Glasgow transport museum.”

Outside in what is usually the car park, a replica exterior of Rillington Place has been built right down to the dark green door of No. 10. You could imagine tapping the rusted knocker and a bespectacled Christie owlishly peering out through one of the windows.

In a holding area off the set, several trestle tables sit piled high with props including lamps, crockery, aged tinned foods and cereal packets. To one side, a shrouded and trussed-up mannequin lies contorted on a couch, the limbs secured with rope. I lay a hand on one of the exposed feet. It feels cold to the touch.

How does Campbell get inside the head of a character when devising set ideas? “It depends on the production,” she says. “Christie is a psychopath, so that is tricky. I don’t think you ever get inside his head.

“He was disgusting. For example, we knew he had pornography and stashes of horrible things. That was probably enough direction. When Ethel dies – when he kills her – the house falls to pieces around him.”

To that end, there is almost a sense of deja vu for Campbell: she worked on the 2011 ITV drama, Appropriate Adult, about the serial killer Fred West and his wife Rosemary.

The Gloucestershire duo murdered at least 12 women between 1967 and 1987, burying the bodies in the cellar and garden of their Cromwell Street home.

“It was a strange one to work on because it’s such appalling subject matter,” she says. “There was a lot of information and you did learn things that you didn’t want to know. It was seeing things and you can never forget them. We saw police footage and had access to a lot of stuff that was really desperate.”

How did Campbell deal with that? “I think we did it by being quite reverential to the women who were killed,” she says. “We tried to be sensitive because their families are still alive. We wanted to be as kind and decent as we could.”

Rillington Place begins on BBC One, Tuesday, 9pm