I’ve been lucky enough recently to visit London a few times and on one of my day trips, while my sister was touring The Houses of Parliament thanks to a competition she had won, I went a little further and finally visited The Shad Thames, the location for 1984’s Resurrection of the Daleks. I’d wanted to visit it for a while but never found enough time in my days around London; but as this was going to be the only thing I did on that day, I made the trek down there.
Well, I say “trek”: I managed to navigate myself around on the Tube, getting off at Tower Hill. I don’t know if there are closer stations, but this is where Google Maps sent me! I did get to see some of the sights along the way — not only were there remains of the original city walls dating back to the Roman occupation, but I also got some nice photos of The Tower of London, which was used in The Christmas Invasion, The Power of Three, and The Day of the Doctor as a UNIT base; I further got to walk along Tower Bridge, which I’m glad to see has been put back together after getting pretty much destroyed in Spider-Man: Far From Home!
On the other side of Tower Bridge, The Shad Thames is pretty easy to find: the striking form of old warehouses and now flats and offices still looms large over the Thames. Originally completed in 1873, the Victorian warehouses once housed large amounts of tea, coffee, spices, and other things brought in from around the world, the area soon becoming known as “The Larder of London”. But congestion on the Thames would force items to be unloaded from ships further up the Thames, and so these warehouses soon fell into disrepair, eventually ceasing to house anything in mid-1972, after 99 years of operation.
Shad Thames would then begin to crop up in various television shows and movies as a filming location, thanks in part to the fact that it hadn’t much changed since the Victorian era — indeed, walking along its cobbled streets with iron walkways hanging above you, it isn’t hard to imagine it as it originally was. You can picture the fog and mist, almost hear the boat horns on the river, feel how cold it must have been, hear people from all around the world talking and shouting. And it being Victorian London, you can imagine its seedier underbelly, the crime, drugs, and vice. It’s a very evocative area that still has the power to take you back to those times.
But it’s the 1980s we’re interested in, when the BBC rolled up to film the location shots for Resurrection of the Daleks. 12th September 1983 saw the TARDIS landing at the other end of the Daleks’ time-corridor, which was actually the corner of Butler’s Wharf nearest Tower Bridge. In the television episode, it looks quite shabby and dirty; nowadays, though, there is a walkway, which, if you own a boat, would take you down to where your boat is moored. It’s in front of this walkway that the TARDIS lands.
In the above picture, in the corner where the bikes have been put, the Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison), Tegan Jovanka (Janet Fielding), and Turlough (Mark Strickson) look out over the Thames to see where they are. It’s also here and along the walkway that a number of promotional photos featuring Davison, Fielding, and Strickson were taken with the Daleks.
Staying in this area of Butlers Wharf, the Doctor and his companions finish checking where they are and then head off towards the left, which is the entrance and exit to Butlers Wharf. The Doctor is telling Tegan and Turlough the history of the place as they walk through.
This is the only time this side of the entrance is used: every time a character leaves the location, they use the other side, so we then see the Thames in front of them. But it isn’t hard to see how much restoration and regeneration the area received during the late 1980s and 1990s when the area was turned into the place it is now.
If you then walk along the pavement heading east, and turn around to face Tower Bridge, you can see where Tegan is fleeing from the dodgy policemen. While it isn’t noticeable in the television episode because you can get away with saying that the locations are all different areas, in reality, Tegan would have had to run past the TARDIS as she exited the Shad Thames. So why didn’t she just go inside the TARDIS? It’s only when you visit these locations that you start to ponder these questions.
Along the pavement, so long as you keep the street-lights in view to take a picture, it’s actually pretty easy to see where Tegan would have run along and where she would’ve had to have passed the TARDIS to get away. Maybe in those days, companions weren’t given a key to the TARDIS.
Along here, it is also easy to find where Tegan stops at the Wharf steps and tries to warn an old man using a metal detector on the shoreline about the dodgy policemen chasing her. The steps were demolished when the Wharf was heavily rebuilt in the late 1980s and the present walkway covers the shoreline it had led to. That’s probably for the best as they looked quite rickety when Tegan tried to run down them; many, many years of wear and tear and water damage had probably made them unsafe by then.
One might think that this area was going to be harder to spot, but almost right where Tegan stops now sits a boat with a red water wheel on the back of it; it’s in front of this boat that Tegan begins to climb down the steps and then a few seconds later, the evil policemen arrive and shoot the metal detectorist.
Butlers Wharf has ties to another Dalek story with its impressive façade being seen in 1964’s The Dalek Invasion of Earth, where the First Doctor and Ian Chesterton (played respectively by William Hartnell and William Russell) are exploring the docklands of Dalek-occupied London and look over the Thames; there’s a shot of this side of Butler’s Wharf, where, in 1983, the TARDIS would land to bring the Doctor and his companions back to a similar are. Perhaps this how he seems to know so much about the area as he’s talking to Tegan and Turlough?
Heading into The Shad Thames now and the slightly shadowy streets within, if you turn around and look at the other side of the entrance, you can see where the Doctor and Stein (Rodney Bewes) head back to the TARDIS and are followed and watched by a policeman.
In the same area, Tegan would later be escorted back to the Daleks’ time-tunnel by the policemen, walking past the right-hand-side windows.
It’s not hard to see why Tegan eventually got captured by the alien policemen when she finally manages to get out of the warehouses — all she does is run around in circles. Of course, this is in keeping with many of the Doctor’s companions, but if she had left the warehouses and headed left when she got outside, she might have been safe; instead, she turns right, which takes her around The Shad Thames again. It’s almost as bad as, when visiting Charlton in Chichester where they filmed Terror of the Zygons, Sarah and UNIT would have passed the evil-Harry a number of times if you just followed the locations around!
When Tegan is escorted back to the warehouses by the policemen, she heads to the right of the above picture. This actually brings us to the last of her locations, where she comes around the corner to where a number of restaurants now sit. She’s just run up Curlew Street and we see her appear pretty much opposite where a Cantina now sits.
One of the most famous shots from Resurrection of the Daleks is of the Doctor pushing a Dalek out of the window. It was one of the areas that I had more trouble finding than I thought I would, mainly because I only had the windows and old walkways to go off… and all of them look exactly the same. Nowadays, I’ve got cafes and restaurants to use to identify where things were originally filmed, but for that shot, I had to look at the building itself.
I did notice one thing: the window where the Dalek takes its tumble is set above a doorway, which is set back into the walls. Luckily, if you are facing Curlew Street, there is only one of those doorways. While it doesn’t look too high up in the television story, Peter Davison would have been on the second floor to push the Dalek out of the window. The ground floor was boarded up, as was the window above it, then the Doctor is seen in the second large window. Now, it’s not too far from the Cantina, so if the location actually made sense in the story, there is no reason why Tegan didn’t walk past the remains of the Dalek when she was fleeing the warehouses and policemen.
And facing down this road is where the opening scenes for the story were filmed, with the alien escapees being gunned down by the policemen. Again, this was quite hard to find the exact area because of the windows, walls, and walkways looking exactly the same! But hopefully in the picture below, I’ve given you a pretty good idea of where the close-up on the policeman shooting the escapees was filmed.
Moving along to Curlew Street and the surrounding areas, we come to the final three locations. At the corner of Curlew Street, we can see where the policemen leave the warehouses with their commander Lytton (Maurice Colbourne) at the end of the story.
The bollards are clear in the television story and Tegan, when trying to get away in the second episode, would have come along past all the restaurants and estate agents and through the entrance to Butler’s Wharf, then along the pavement which runs along the side of the Thames. She would then be taken back around to the entrance of the Shad Thames, not the one to Butler’s Wharf, for her to be seen walking past the right-hand windows of that second entrance. It’s rather confusing!
Facing down Curlew Street, we then see where Lytton and his two policemen walk off into the sunset at the end of the story. After she leaves the Doctor and Turlough, Tegan would theoretically take this route out of the warehouses. But it would make more sense for her to go past the entrance to Butler’s Wharf and then follow the road to Tower Bridge.
The final location used in this area was Lafone Street. On the corner of Lafone Street, you’ll find The Dean Swift pub. Again, this was quite a tough location to find, thanks to all the streets looking exactly the same, but I believe that in the television episode, when the Army captain goes to use a telephone booth to call for reinforcements, that booth is just in front of what is now the pub. The buildings on the left-hand side of the screen in those scenes are now gone and I think it’s a small park. It’s the building at the end of the street that I used to find where these scenes had been shot: each door and window up the middle is painted TARDIS blue, and it just looks like it’s had a paint job since 1983.
There are quite a lot of locations used for Resurrection of the Daleks in a pretty small area. As I said above, a lot of the logic of the location goes out the window when you’re walking around and you’ll notice things like where Tegan should have walked past the remains of the Dalek which was pushed out the window. And why didn’t she just get into the TARDIS when she was running away from the policemen?
I was surprised to see just how little the locations had changed. There have been renovations and restoration work done to turn the area into luxury flats, bars, and restaurants. I live in the country, so I’m used to things staying the same; but I would have thought somewhere like this, which was only ever used as docklands before falling into wrack and ruin would have been knocked down decades ago. Thankfully, it hasn’t, and it made for a great morning out!
And the area has been used in so many television shows and movies; most recently, it was seen in Amazon Prime’s Citadel. No one seemed in the least bit bothered that I was wandering around, getting in their way, taking pictures. Either that or they are Dalek duplicates, gathering information for their Dalek masters…
