Shopping

Spread out before me is a vast sea of costumes hanging neatly on five-and-a-half miles’ worth of strong, metal rails. In the distance I can just about pick out a long row of Georgian bonnets in muted pinks and greens, their ribbons trailing; a slew of crimson cardinal costumes stand stiffly together nearby.

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Name a film or TV series from the last six decades and there’s a good chance its costumes lurk somewhere among the million and a half stored in this unlikely corner of Hendon. Up close, you can appreciate the frothy prettiness of a 1930s chiffon dress or the braiding on an eighteenth-century officer’s uniform, but it’s the enormous scale of this extraordinary warehouse, home to the world’s longest-established costumiers, that impresses. This is the other face of the business that runs the much-loved fancy dress hire shop on Shaftesbury Avenue. Better known by the general public for the shop, in the world of film, theatre and TV, Angels is a byword for costume-making of the highest standard. Perhaps you didn’t realise it when you hired a Dracula costume for Halloween, but the very same company also made the costumes for various James Bonds, the Indiana Jones trilogy, ‘Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves’, ‘Titanic’, ‘The Pink Panther’ and ‘Lawrence of Arabia’.

Feathery finery: inside the crown and jewellery room

Sadly, most of the costumes used in films have never been hired out to the public because they’re too valuable and can be re-hired to the film world (the outfit Richard Burton wore as Marc Antony in the 1963 movie ‘Cleopatra’ had its next cinematic outing on Sid James in ‘Carry On Cleo’ in 1964). Some, however, have slipped through the net: helmets used in ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’ (1975); those memorable ‘Only Fools and Horses’ Batman and Robin costumes; and, most famously, the original Obi-Wan Kenobi cloak, as worn by Alec Guinness in the original ‘Star Wars’ (1977).