The Lavender Hill Mob - Production

Production

Screenwriter Clarke is said to have come up with the idea of a clerk robbing his own bank while doing research for the film Pool of London (1951), a crime thriller surrounding a jewel theft. He consulted the Bank of England on the project and it set up a special committee to advise on how best the robbery could take place.

Extensive location filming was made in both London and Paris. The scenes show a London still marked by bomb sites from the Second World War.

London, England, UK

• Bank Underground Station
• Bank of England, Threadneedle Street
• Bramley Arms Pub, Bramley Road, Notting Hill (finale: end of the chase)
• Cheapside
• Carlton Road, Ealing (zebra crossing on way to police exhibition)
• Gunnersbury Park (police exhibition)
• Queen Victoria Street, Blackfriars (scene of bullion robbery)
• RAF Northolt, Ruislip (airport)

Paris, France

• River Seine
• Eiffel Tower

In the car chase scene at the end of the film, an officer uses a police box to report seeing a police car being driven by a man in a top hat. In fact, the driver is wearing the uniform of the police as originally set up in 1829 by Sir Robert Peel, known as "Bobbies" or "Peelers."

The scene where Holland and Pendlebury run down the Eiffel Tower steps and become increasingly dizzy and erratic, as does the camera work, presages James Stewart's condition in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, made seven years later.