Bucket List Adventures: Alfred Hitchcock Mosaics, Leytonstone

On the way back to the south coast after a weekend in Saffron Walden, I took a small detour via Gants Hill — where I used to live, where my mum grew up, and where my grandma had her home. A quick look round, a wander past familiar streets, and then on with the plan.

I also stopped at Shalom Hot Bagels Bakery to pick up some goodies for an upcoming home screening of Yentl as part of my 1984 Revisited project. That was always part of the itinerary. So was finally ticking off something that’s been on my bucket list for years: the Alfred Hitchcock mosaics at Leytonstone tube station.

They were installed after I’d moved away from the area, so despite years on the Central Line, I’d never actually seen them. It felt overdue.

A few stops along the London Underground and there they are — seventeen mosaics celebrating Alfred Hitchcock, born in Leytonstone in 1899. They’re bold, graphic and feel very cinematic. The Mosaics were designed and made by artists Steve and Nathan Lobb, Carol Kenna, Claire Notley and Julie Norburn at Greenwich Mural Workshop, Macbean Centre in Woolwich, SE18.

The imagery is instantly recognisable: the shower scene from Psycho, the crop-duster from North by Northwest, flocks of birds gathering, silhouettes framed in windows. Stylised rather than literal, but unmistakably Hitchcock. They transform ordinary underpasses and platforms into a kind of public gallery.

What I like most is that they’re just there — part of daily life. Commuters rushing past scenes from film history without necessarily clocking them. No fanfare, no special exhibition, just cinema embedded into the fabric of a neighbourhood.

It was a very satisfying bucket list tick. A weekend that began in Saffron Walden, paused in Gants Hill, involved bagels for Yentl, and ended with a short Central Line hop to see mosaics I should have visited years ago.