DISCOVER Arnside & Silverdale
The most poignant and British of cinematic love stories comes to life on a walk from this now immortal station.
‘IT ALL STARTED on an ordinary day, in the most ordinary place in the world – the refreshment room at Milford Junction.’ What started on that ordinary day, when Dr Alec Harvey offered to remove a piece of grit from Laura Jesson’s eye, turned into one of the greatest romances ever seen on screen.
Starring Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, and directed by David Lean, Brief Encounter was released in 1945 and is now a classic of British cinema. The tale of two strangers, both married, meeting by chance at a railway station and falling deeply in love was based on a short play by Noël Coward called Still Life.
He expanded it into a screenplay which is funny, sweet and heartbreaking, as Alec and Laura wrestle with longing and guilt, and ultimately realise they can never be together. Laura narrates the story, her innermost thoughts accentuated by the dramatic notes of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto, and you hear Coward’s voice too: in an uncredited role, he announces the trains at Milford Junction.
That station is, in real life, Carnforth in Lancashire, and for fans of Brief Encounter, the place is anything but ordinary. To walk through the underpass where they steal their first kiss, race up the long ramps which Lean thought would give Laura more ‘swan-like’ grace than steps, pass under the clock and visit the refreshment room – it’s like stepping onto the set as an extra. Some locals did just that – responding to an advert in the paper offering a ‘Chance for film fans’ that promised ‘meals and good remuneration’, adding ‘it should be very interesting and perhaps good fun!’ Carnforth sits by Morecambe Bay, on the southern cusp of the Arnside and Silverdale Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty – although the location wasn’t chosen for its natural good looks. The film makers had very precise requirements for the station. It had to be on a mainline so they could shoot express trains steaming through, but it also needed local lines for trains to the fictional stops of Churley and Ketchworth, where Alec and Laura lived. And crucially, because they were filming in early 1945, and at night, it had to be far en
