Search

    Quilter Street (London, UK)

    The modest terraced house in London’s East End plays a central role in Mike Leigh`s SECRETS AND LIES (1996).

    photo of a London street with terraced houses
    Quilter Street (picture by Christopher Hilton)

    In the film, Hortense is a young black optometrist, living in London. She weeps at her mother’s funeral. Her father is already dead. They are her adoptive parents, and she now feels the need to try to find her birth mother.

    She receives instructions to visit a social worker, who, along with some general sympathetic advice, gives her her case file. From this, Hortense discovers to her surprise and consternation that her birth mother was white.

    Her mother is Cynthia, a sad, unmarried woman who works in a factory, and lives in this terrace house with her daughter Roxanne, a council road sweeper.

    Back to table of contents.