Filming in East London: a flat floor, level load-in and free parking

A location either helps a shoot day or fights it. Fighting a location shows up as time lost to carrying kit up stairs, chasing daylight you cannot control, and moving vehicles you cannot park. Arcadia Riverside was built for large events, which happens to make it a workable space for filming and production too. Here is what a crew gets to work with.

A flat, single-level floor

The main space is a flat, single-level floor. No raised sections to work around, no split levels to negotiate with a dolly or a scissor lift. You can build a set, lay track, roll flight cases and reset between takes on one continuous surface. For anything that moves, a camera, a crane, a car, a crowd, a flat floor removes a whole category of problems before you start.

Light you can control

Windows give you soft, natural daylight when a scene wants it. When it does not, the interiors can be blacked out, so you are lighting to your own plan rather than to whatever the sky is doing outside. Having both in one space matters. You can shoot a bright daytime interior in the morning and a controlled night look in the afternoon without moving to a second location.

Level load-in, minutes from the A13

Getting the kit in is often the slowest part of a shoot day. The venue is a few minutes from the A13, so trucks reach it without a long run through residential streets. Level, step-free load-in means a faster get-in and get-out, which protects the hours you actually want to spend rolling.

For unit vehicles there are more than 50 free parking spaces on site, so trucks, generators and crew cars have somewhere to sit for the day without permits or meters. Do check your vehicles against the ULEZ, though, since the venue sits inside the zone.

Take the whole venue on a dry hire

For a production that needs control, the site is available as a dry-hire, full-venue takeover. You get the space as a blank canvas to dress, light and run to your own schedule, without another event sharing the building or the car park. That suits a shoot that needs a locked-off location, a set build that stays up across several days, or a launch that films its own content on the day.

If you are weighing up rooms, the ballroom gives you scale on a single floor, while Castle Green Hall is a column-free, ground-floor space with its own entrance, which is useful when you want a clean load-in of its own.

Two-camera recording in house

If the job is capturing an event rather than a scripted shoot, you may not need to bring a full crew. Our in-house team, Arcadia AV, records on two cameras and can livestream, so a conference, a panel, a launch or an awards ceremony can be filmed and streamed without a separate production hire. Two angles gives you cutaways and reactions instead of one flat locked-off view.

A quick pre-visit checklist

Before you lock the date, walk through these with us:

• Power: how many circuits and where the distribution sits.
• Blackout: which areas you need dark and for how long.
• Load-in: vehicle sizes and the get-in and get-out windows.
• Parking: how many unit vehicles, and their ULEZ status.
• Coverage: whether you are bringing a crew or using Arcadia AV.

An in-house coordinator handles the booking from first enquiry through to the wrap, so there is one person who knows your plan and can answer these on the day.

Book a recce

Tell us what you are shooting, the kit you are bringing and the days you need, and we will talk you through access, blackout and parking. See the space on the exhibitions, launches and filming page, or send us the details and we will reply the same working day.