The Sharp Side

The key to Alfred Hitchcock's oeuvre is, of course, Leytonstone. He was born at 517 The High Road on August 13, 1899. Some time after 1907 the family moved (Hitchcock biographies are vague about when). Hitchcock was, like Shakespeare, a shopkeeper's son. Both were born literally above the family shop. They both worked in a new and expanding medium of public entertainment, they both produced great art inside a form which was often populist and trashy, and their work contains traces of their origins. Gloves, wool and tanning have a personal frame of reference for Shakespeare. Shops, and particularly fruit and veg, have a special significance for Hitchcock.

In Hitchcock's case there are a cluster of obsessions in his movies which can all be traced back to his childhood in Leytonstone. Notoriously, there is his interest in the theme of wrongful imprisonment and police who are intimidating or sinister and often not very bright. This, according to Hitchcock, resulted from him being locked up at the age of five in the police station close to the family shop. That terrifying experience marked him for life. One of my favourite early Hitchcock movies is Sabotage, which offers a fantasy reconstruction of High Road, Leytonstone, with a grocery shop next door to a cinema. In one droll scene the plain clothes cop, who is working undercover as a greengrocer, is harassed by the local plod. Another officious cop is instrumental in the detonation of a terrorist bomb by not letting a child cross a road.



















A related Hitchcock criminal obsession is Jack the Ripper and serial murder/sex crime. No Hitchcock biographer seems to have noticed that the Hitchcock family shop was a short stroll from the Catholic cemetery where one of the Ripper's victims is buried. In Hitchcock's oeuvre it ties in with that other theme, the odd, sometimes voyeuristic son and the weird, smothering mother, which also has discernible biographical origins.

And lastly there is the theme of public transport. Trains and buses are always important in Hitchcock, sometimes underlined by those cameo appearances where he has difficulty boarding. Horse trams went by the family home, and in 1906 the electric tram came to Leytonstone, with a massive junction at Knotts Green, by the police station where he was locked up. Hitchcock spent many happy hours travelling all over London on trams and trains.




















The Hitchcock grocery store on High Road, Leytonstone. The boy on the horse is conventionally identified as young Alfred but it may well be his brother. There is a tiled version at Leytonstone tube station:
























Hitchcock's birthplace survived until the 1960s, when the local Labour council, shrewdly realising that a Hitchcock birthplace museum would be of no interest to anyone, gave permission for it to be demolished to allow the construction of a garage. Four of the neighbouring houses still survive. The shop in the middle of the three in the photograph below is the one which today most resembles the Hitchcock shop. Compare its upstairs windows with those in the tiled depiction.



















And now here's a short movie of the fruit and veg man and his interests.