How Do You Make a Warehouse Look British? 🇬🇧

In episode 6 of The Flight Attendant on HBOMax, we get a few brief shots of Cecilia, Miranda’s associate, in an undisclosed warehouse. What you may or may not have realized is that even though this warehouse was actually located in Brooklyn, NYC it was scripted to be located in London.

So when Jess gave me the responsibility to do this set the first interesting question I pondered was, “how do you make a warehouse look British or that it is located in London?”

I mean if you are in a car and the scene is supposed to take place in London you just need the drivers side to be on the right and voila we have the visual cues we need.

But what about a warehouse? 🤔

The first thing I tried to do was google search as many permutations of the words “London warehouse” “warehouse in Britain” as I could. And believe it or not, the internet is not rife with photos of the insides of British warehouses, and even when they are it’s hard to see anything particularly British about them.

So then I started looking up warehouse shelving and solution companies based in the UK and combing through their brochures, catalogs, and websites to try to get some good reference photos. This method elucidated some good warehouse photos—but they were mostly very sterile looking, huge industrial scale warehouses that looked borderline like stock photos.

The ideal photo I was hoping for was a chaotic-in-the-middle-of-fulfilling-a-lot-of-orders warehouse on a Wednesday morning at 10am with lots of life layers and details I could study. I never found that photo of my dreams.

So I started thinking of ways we could express Britishness (or at least distinguish the space from an American counterpart) and this is what I came up with:

1. A4 paper

2. British office supplies—particularly those file holders I always see on British and European shows but which we don’t really use in America cause we use binders instead.

3. Some British snacks.

4. British style light switch and electrical outlet covers (which are very different since they are on a whole different voltage and outlet prong system).

5. British premiere league football (soccer) team paraphernalia.

Ultimately these are very small and specific details that most people wouldn’t notice on screen one way or another (we’ll get back to them later though). When you are doing a set that is 93% boxed air (literally), you gotta keep it interesting for yourself though.

A lot of the main work of this set was of course filling a completely empty room by finding the shelving, furniture, and a quantity of boxes, crates, and containers of varying sizes, color, and texture to make a convincing looking warehouse that also had visual interest. None of which (boxes, shelving, basic warehouse furniture) was that distinguishable between British vs. American.

Warehouse Before

Warehouse After—93% boxed air.

I also gave myself the added challenge of not using ULINE (for political reasons) for this set—when definitely this is a set MEANT for ordering from ULINE. It would have definitely been the easiest and most straightforward way to get the great majority of shopping done fast and cheap. And normally I advocate for not making things more complicated than they need to be, but…in this case no.

I mean just that above was enough to keep me busy (its the quantity and volume I was talking about!). When you have an empty room, you really gotta make the calculations to make sure you are going to have enough stuff to fill the space with enough variation to look natural and interesting.

The worst fear of all decorators is to be dressing a set and realizing you don’t have enough stuff and no time (or money left) to get it. I wish I had the picture of the paper I used to calculate and plan each shelf ahead of time to make sure we had enough things to fill all the space but I definitely threw that away.

So after I got that taken care of Jess supported me on my mission to find all the British details listed above.

1. A4 Paper.

   I special ordered a carton of A4 paper from a paper supplier to use for all paperwork and printed signs in the warehouse.

Living in Asia for 10 years (for my first career), one of the weird small frustrating things I encountered is how standardized paper sizes outside of the US are different from what we use in the US (haha America likes to do that). So my American folders, document covers, and binders wouldn’t work with the local document sizes. If you want to learn everything about American letter size paper vs. A4, click here.

I thought this was a fun detail that yeah absolutely nobody will notice at home and likely not even the actors, yet it brought a level of authentic realism to the set that at least Jess and I could enjoy knowing.

2. British Office Supplies

I got in there looking for the British equivalent of Staples and scrolled through all their inventory to see what actually looked different than what I would find at Staples, and I discovered quite a lot actually!

This was August during COVID so shipping times and fulfillment were dicey especially for an international order. I even reached out to a few British office supply companies to see if they would work with me on shipping times. They all said no, but one guy suggested Amazon.co.uk which was 💡.

A glimpse of my Amazon.co.uk order (there was more not pictured here too!)

👀 some of the British office supplies from the order? To me those yellow pens are emblematic because they look very un-American to me. You might notice the British electrical cover and some British snacks in here too (we will get to that in a second).

You might be thinking 🧐 “wait a minute, I don’t ever remember seeing this desk in the warehouse…” Which I unfortunately have to say “yes 😔, sadly we never even see this part of the room at all on screen in the final cut!” (The angles that were scouted were not the same ones that ended up on screen in the final cut of the episode).

This actually happens all the time in our work, and 🤷🏻‍♀️ you gotta be doing it for the love of the game and the enjoyment of the process. Because besides that we have very little control of what ultimately ends up on screen after the final edit.

anyways here’s another angle of the desk with all the A4 paper, imported British office supplies and British snacks…

On one hand, it was a slight blessing in disguise because the biggest pieces of distinctive British (and all European actually) office supplies that are visibly different than American ones were the document file holders they use instead of the binders we Americans use.

The ones I ordered got held up, our filming date got pushed earlier, so in the end they didn’t arrive in time 😭.. So we ended up having to use some binders (and it was killing me on the inside because I knew they weren’t right and we had ordered the right ones they just weren’t here on time!). Well turns out either way you never saw the shelf where the document file holders should have gone.

3. Some British snacks

This one was pretty easy, I knew there was a British food importer in Connecticut, and just ordered some snacks off their website, and called them to make sure the shipping would arrive in time. Any food item you catch on screen is from them!

4. British style light switch and electrical outlet covers

You might have noticed from the above image of my Amazon.co.uk order that it included two outlet plate covers. Anyone who has traveled to the UK will realize, hmm we speak the same language, share a lot of cultural heritage, and yet I can’t charge my cellphone here without getting a voltage adapter…

Covering up all the American outlets with British outlet covers seemed like an easy win and way to convey visually this warehouse is in LONDON.

5. British premiere league football (soccer) team paraphernalia.

This idea to communicate British-ness was not only seemingly low-hanging fruit in displaying a different sports culture than America, but it was also intended as a tribute to one of Jess and my favorite prop house warehouse workers: Josh at State Supply Props.

When State Supply was at their Harlem location, Josh’s workspace at the loading dock was a living altar to the Mets. He had so much sports fan paraphernalia hanging up everywhere so we thought it would be fun to make the British warehouse loading dock character’s working space an homage to Josh just with a British football team.

Turns out WarnerMedia’s legal team only gave me the ok to put up ONE branded British football team fan item…so I tried to chose wisely and we put it here:

That’s a British football team scarf hanging over the bulletin board…do you know what team?

Now of course, which team should our warehouse worker character support was a whole thing. As an American and someone who pays so little attention to sports, I had no sense of what fandom of each team signified. Even though I don’t really pay attention to sports, I do understand the many unsaid and understood signifiers of a Yankees fan v.s a Mets fan in NYC.

So I turned to the internet to try and figure out what team would make sense for our warehouse worker, and stumbled upon this wonderful gem from Reddit:

I found this breakdown hilarious despite its…shall we say crudeness. I double checked this with a British friend who said it was startlingly accurate.

“White van drivers called Tony” sounded like exactly the profile of the character I was thinking of, so West Ham it was!

AND YOU ACTUALLY GET TO SEE THE WEST HAM SCARF ON SCREEN!

Those boxes behind Cecilia were custom printed and had kg and cm units of measurement.

BONUS!

Oh one last bonus one: if you notice all these boxes have the weights in kg and dimensions in cm because the rest of the world (including the UK) uses the metric system. We had these boxes custom printed and I asked our graphic designer, Ambika to please make sure the dimensions were in metric.

I’m 100% aware that 0 people watching the show noticed any of these details I went through painstaking trouble to realize and now just recount to you, but I’m so grateful Jess gave me the space and encouragement to do it anyway.

I mean, a lot of times these small decorating details are just for the actors or ourselves or the abstract belief that even if they aren’t noticed explicitly the sum total of their presence creates an overall tangible feeling of authentic natural realism.

Like I said earlier, you gotta be doing it for the love of the game and the enjoyment of the process so that even if the work doesn’t ultimately appear on screen or get noticed by viewers, at least you can be proud of the work.