For anyone else who’s interested, I was poking around on the web after watching *The Ladykillers *recently and came across this excellent page comparing filming locations at the time the movie was made with their state now. The page is a few years old now, so some changes have taken place since it went live.
Vernon Rise (where Alec Guinness hung the “not working” sign on the public phone) is still recognizable from the buildings in the background on King’s Cross Road, as is Argyle Street (used for the shots looking down the street from the front door of Mrs. Wilberforce’s house). However, the area north and west of King’s Cross station where the robbery of the van was filmed has changed greatly since the page was put up because of the construction of St. Pancras International to add Eurostar service.
The junction of Goods Way and Battle Bridge Road, which the van traverses before turning into Cheney Street (where the robbery takes place), no longer exists after the intersection was realigned a few years ago when St. Pancras International went up. (See the 2 Sept. 2002 entry and map on the web page.) Short stretches of Battle Bridge Road and Cheney Street still exist, but most of the surrounding buildings have been torn down and what’s left is fenced off and mostly inaccessible and, I gather, will be obliterated at some point in the not-too-distant future.
C’est la guerre, but I suppose nothing lasts forever. I lived not too far away (just across Regent’s Park) for two years starting in spring 1999 and wish I had been aware then of the site’s cinematic significance, as this was before the redevelopment had begun, but at the time I had only seen *The Ladykillers *once and that was ages ago. For anyone who’s interested in how the King’s Cross/St. Pancras area looked before the facelift, this book is available from Amazon’s U.K. website and other sources.