History
Pinewood Studios was built on the estate of Heatherden Hall, which was a large, attractive Victorian house with spectacular grounds. It was purchased by Canadian financier and MP for Chiswick and Brentford, Lt. Col. Grant Morden, who spent a fortune transforming the mansion into a show-piece home, adding refinements such as a huge ballroom, a Turkish bath and an indoor squash court. Due to its seclusion, it was used as a discreet meeting place for high-ranking politicians and diplomats and the agreement to create the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed there.
On Morden's death in 1934, building tycoon Charles Boot bought the land and turned it into a Country Club. The ballroom was converted into a restaurant and many of the bedrooms became furnished suites.
Read more about this topic: Pinewood Studios
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I cannot be much pleased without an appearance of truth; at least of possibility—I wish the history to be natural though the sentiments are refined; and the characters to be probable, though their behaviour is excelling.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)