Twickenham Exchange is a community building with, depending who you ask, a 300 or 320 seat theatre, six studio rooms, a cafe and a bar. It is located at Brewery Wharf, opposite Twickenham railway building site / station, and opened in October 2017. It is owned by Richmond upon Thames Council, and managed by nearby St Mary's University, Twickenham.
Twickenham Exchange, complete with roadworks and a post office van that wouldn’t go away
The Exchange plays host to film screenings by the local Twickenham Cinema Club, folk music events organised in partnership with TwickFolk, talks, drama and comedy (Andy Parsons, Jason Manford and Mark Steel have performed here).
The studio rooms are popular with young people’s performing arts classes, after-school clubs and adult well-being classes. They are also hired out by private companies for training courses and meetings.
In normal times there are three or four public ticketed events in the theatre each week, including a film, an author/spoken word event and programmed comedy, music or theatre.
Inside the 300 / 320 seat theatre
Enjoyed a showing about six months ago of the Beatles 1964 film A Hard Day’s Night with a group of friends, where through a preamble from a local authority on the subject we learned that much of the material was filmed in Twickenham and Isleworth. Despite the passage of time, knowing which bits to look out for we spotted a few landmarks (photographs follow).
Kew Bridge Water Tower
Standing at 197 feet high, it was constructed in 1867 for the Kew Bridge Pumping Station. A mere 97 years later it made an appearance, in the far distance, as Ringo strolled across fields in the Isleworth / Brentford area in A Hard Day’s Night. The site is now part of the rather splendid Brentford Steam Museum.
The Turk's Head pub in Twickenham
It's about four hundred metres from Twickenham Film Studios, where most of the interior scenes of A Hard Day’s Night were filmed. The pub makes Beatles fans very welcome, and if you ask nicely, apparently they might show A Hard Day’s Night on the pub’s big screen so you can watch it in one the places the film was actually shot. Nice touch.
Ringo in The Turk's Head
On March 10th 1964, Ringo Starr filmed a solo ‘walkabout’ scene for a A Hard Day’s Night. It concludes with a visit to the Turk's Head where, served with a stale sandwich, he complains about it and interrupts the pub games.
Although she was not involved in the above scene, Ringo was accompanied to the pub by Pattie Boyd, who played a schoolgirl in the film. She married George Harrison two years later. On April 24th 1964 all four Beatles visited Winchester Hall, the pub’s function room, for a ‘wrap party’, to celebrate the completion of the shooting of the film.
In October 2001, members of the original cast and crew visited the pub to film for the bonus DVD of A Hard Day’s Night.
Red arrow: The Twickenham Exchange
Pink arrow: The Turks Head pub.
Black arrow: Kew Water Tower, (about a mile north east)
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