Room at The Top - Background and Production

Background and Production

James Woolf bought the novel, originally intending to cast Stewart Granger and Jean Simmons. He hired Jack Clayton as director after seeing The Bespoke Overcoat.

Room at the Top is considered the first of the British New Wave of realistic and gritty film dramas. It was filmed at Shepperton Studios in London, with extensive location work in Halifax, Yorkshire, which stood in for the fictional towns of Warnley and Dufton. Some scenes were also filmed in Bradford, notably with Joe travelling on a bus and spotting Susan in a lingerie shop and the outside of the amateur dramatics theatre. Greystones, a large mansion in the Savile Park area of Halifax, was used for location filming of the outside scenes of the Brown family mansion. Halifax railway station doubled as Warnley Station in the film, and Halifax Town Hall was used for the Warley Town Hall filming.

Vivien Leigh was originally offered the part of Alice, which eventually went to Simone Signoret.