About a Boy | Acton Town Hall — "Killing Me Softly," and the boy who refused to be rescued

Marcus decides that the way to fix his mother is to sing "Killing Me Softly with His Song" at the school concert, alone, in front of every child who already torments him. Will tells him not to. Marcus does it anyway, and Will walks on with an electric guitar to stand beside him. The film's whole argument — that people are not islands, they are chains — is settled in that four minutes on stage.

It was filmed at Acton Town Hall on Acton High Street, in west London. The Baroque front, seven bays with Doric columns around the doorway, was designed by Raffles and Gridley and opened in March 1910; the assembly hall with its stage and balcony was added by William Leicester in the late 1930s. That hall had a life before the film: The Who played it in 1962, and Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros in 2002, the same year Marcus sang there.

The building is Grade II listed and became surplus to council use; in 2018 the complex was converted into flats, the council chamber included. So the stage is gone and the hall is somebody's home. Stand on the High Street pavement and look up at the columns instead, and take the measure of how ordinary the front is for a room where three generations of people got up in public and risked it.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.