CREDITS A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, 1971 dir: Stanley Kubrick Malcolm McDowell Patrick Magee Adrienne Corri Steven Berkoff David Prowse

“It’s funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen. ”

For many years, Stanley Kubrick’s refusal to allow the film to be shown in the UK gave his blackly comic version of Anthony Burgess’ novel about free will and control an undeserved reputation as a fearsome video nasty.

Set vaguely in the north of England, judging by the accents, the film was made almost entirely on location around London and the Home Counties, with the notoriously travel-phobic Kubrick choosing locations from architectural guides. Virtually the only purpose-built set, the ‘Korova Milk Bar’, was constructed in a factory just off Borehamwood High Street near to the MGM Studios (where 2001 had been shot).

A Clockwork Orange location: 'Municipal Flat Block 18A, Linear North': Tavy Bridge Centre, Thamesmead South

The grim housing estate of Alex (Malcolm McDowell) is part of the unspeakable concrete disaster that is Thamesmead South, a vast, dismal, windswept collection of tower blocks connected by intimidating walkways. The exterior of his glum home is the Tavy Bridge Centre.

The benighted subway, where the Droogs attack the old tramp, can be found over in West London. It’s a tough call – choosing between the four near-identical subways leading down beneath the traffic island dominated by the huge circular advertising installation on Trinity Road, Wandsworth, deserted, unswept and extremely unnerving. I'm finally convinced that it's the southern underpass, between Trinity Road and Swandon Way (not the northern, as I previously noted – sorry!).

A Clockwork Orange location: The attack on the tramp in the sinister subway: Trinity Road, Wandsworth

The ‘Flat Block Marina’ is Thamesmead’s artificially created Southmere Lake. Alex reasserts his dominance over fellow Droogs here by dumping Dim in the water and slicing his outstretched hand at Binsley Walk on the Lake’s western shore overlooked by the tower blocks of Yarnton Way.

More futuristic cityscapes (later cut from the film) filmed in the sixties concrete shopping centre of Friar’s Square in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. Another urban disaster, the centre was closed down in 1990 and drastically remodelled as a much more friendly redbrick indoor mall.

The interior of Alex’s apartment in ‘Municipal Flat Block 18A, Linear North’ is a flat in the village of Elstree. Kubrick was ever the perfectionist: the couple who lived here moved out while £5,000 was spent on redecoration. With filming over and the flat restored to its original state, they returned only to be moved out again so two close-ups could be shot.

The cat woman’s house is a real mansion in the Hertfordshire countryside. Also in Hertfordshire is ‘Home’, Patrick Magee’s futuristic pad and site of the notorious ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ rape of Adrienne Corri (when the two met in Hollywood, Gene Kelly allegedly snubbed Kubrick for the use of this number in the scene). The interior of the house is Skybreak, tucked invisibly away in the tiny village of Warren Radlett, Hertfordshire.

Fast sex to fast food: the très sixties chrome and glass Chelsea Drugstore, which stood on the Kings Road at the northwest corner of Royal Avenue, became record shop, where Alex picks up two girls for a spot of high speed ‘in and out’. The shop closed in the seventies and is now a McDonalds.

A Clockwork Orange location: Alex undergoes aversion therapy at the ‘Ludovico Medical Facility’: Brunel University, Uxbridge

The ‘Ludovico Medical Facility’, where Alex undergoes the gross aversion therapy, is the campus of Brunel University in Uxbridge, Middlesex. The giant overhanging concrete monstrosity is the Lecture Centre in the middle of campus, opposite which Alex is received into the Art Centre. The campus is on Kingston Lane off Hillingdon Hill about a mile south of Uxbridge (tube: Uxbridge).

A Clockwork Orange location: the tramps' revenge: Albert Bridge, Chelsea Embankment

The newly defenceless Alex meets an earlier victim on the Chelsea Embankment at Oakley Street, SW3, and it’s under Albert Bridge that the tramps take their revenge.