FILM director Alfred Hitchcock is undoubtedly one of the most culturally significant people to have come from Leytonstone – but in later life it was his adopted American home that perhaps had the greatest impact on his celebrated works.
Hitchcock's early years growing up in the East End – including a traumatic and arguably defining experience when he was locked in Leytonstone Police Station for ten minutes as a child – have been well documented locally, and his mark on the borough has also been commemorated to a small extent such as with the distinctive murals at the nearby Tube station.
So it is perhaps surprising that there is little honouring the great man in California, where he lived for most of his life after his film career took off.
However the lack of memorials is more than made up by the hundreds of locations in the region that were used by the director in films such as The Birds, Psycho and Vertigo.
Hitchcock fell so in love with the sweeping northern region of the state that he bought a mountaintop home in Santa Cruz in 1940, and even successfully applied for American citizenship with dual nationality there in 1956.
This can arguably be seen most strongly artistically in his 1958 masterpiece Vertigo, described by some critics as a tortured love letter to San Francisco.
Most of the original locations remain today. The apartment where James Stewart's character 'Scottie' lived is still there, although the home's new owner has replaced the distinctive red door and grown a large green hedge in front of it.
But many other locations remain barely recognisable, such as the graveyard at Mission Dolores Church, which is a world away from the lush rose-filled garden depicted in the film, and now lies barren except for the tombs of the dead.
The city's Union Square also features in The Birds, although most of the action takes place in the nearby small coastal town of Bodega Bay.
However many buildings in the film were temporary erected especially for the production and few recognisable locations can be seen today.
But perhaps the most iconic Hitchcock landmark remains almost unchanged. The famous Bates Motel and neighbouring mansion, as featured in the 1960 classic Psycho, have been perfectly preserved at the Universal Studios lot in Los Angeles.
While the immediate area remains a busy filming site even now, the building can be accessed through the adjacent namesake theme park.
For the time being, it is the closest thing to a permanent Hitchcock memorial, and is visited by tens of thousands of tourists every year.
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