A scene from St Pancras Sunrise

IN 1979, the old Camden Journal carried a lurid double-page feature on the Hillview estate, slum Victorian tenement blocks a hop, skip and jump away from King’s Cross’s notorious red light district. Titled “The hell holes of Hillview”, it described how tenants lived in fear of pimps and drug dealers who took over rapidly emptying flats and set up shop. A year later, as hundreds of homeless youngsters were offered temporary accommodation to help combat the problem, prostitute Patsy Malone would be brutally murdered there.

The grim scenario is the backdrop to St Pancras Sunrise, an award-winning short film by Maeve Murphy, a writer and filmmaker originally from Belfast. It opens with archive footage of the 1982 occupation of Holy Cross Church on the edge of the estate by the English Collective of Prostitutes (EPC), who were outraged that the police officer cleared of Patsy Malone’s killing was convicted of dismembering her body and dumping it in Epping Forest.

“Her death was truly horrific,” declares Maeve. “But because sex workers were criminalised people didn’t see them as victims of crime and therefore nobody took it that seriously. The ECP were incredibly bold and brave to raise a red flag to this culture.”

The film’s story of a young woman who moves into Hillview and befriends a prostitute is based on Maeve’s semi-autobiographical 2021 novella, Christmas at the Cross, which returns to a time and a place that has all but been forgotten amid King’s Cross’s rapid transformation as a sought-after address with an eye-watering price tag. Even Hillview, once earmarked for demolition, now has the air of an urban oasis following its extensive refurbishment.

But for Maeve, the King’s Cross of yesteryear remains forever embedded in her heart, warts and all. She lived on Hillview in the early 1990s and her days in a run-down flat with a ripped sofa, a piece of cloth for a curtain and an assortment of life’s casualties as neighbours is vividly described in the book, which was first serialised in the Irish Times. But by this time, the estate had morphed from a criminal ghetto into a distinctive community that was independently managed by residents with the help of a small Camden Council grant to make it just about habitable.

Maeve Murphy at the Silicon Beach Festival in Hollywood

“Let’s face it, it was an inner-city shite hole and you had to watch your back,” Maeve tells me with one of her hearty laughs. “But it had been absolutely beautifully transformed through the care of the residents. It sounds corny, but there was such a sense of friendship and solidarity. People were really there for each other. The compassion and kindness I saw led me to becoming a Buddhist,” she adds in earnest. “Hillview was a great moment and I want to celebrate it.”

Like most people, Maeve ended up on Hillview because she needed somewhere cheap to live very quickly, a 20-something Cambridge English Literature graduate who had set up a women’s theatre company, dabbled in acting and was now at a loss with what to do with her life.

If Hillview had its fair share of misfits, it was also a hotbed of creative talent with the likes of singer Sean McGowan and filmmaker Tilda Swinton among its residents. “There was an incredible counter culture going on and living there was like being plugged into an energy system,” Maeve laughs again. “I had always loved film and decided I would make one. So I borrowed a camera from a filmmaker guy living on the estate and made a short film about my next door neighbour.”

Then, ball of energy that she is, she ambushed Ken Loach at an event at the South Bank with a script she’d written for another film idea and, astonishingly, he invited her to join his production company, Parallax Pictures in Denmark Street, where she worked as runner and receptionist while learning all the elements of filmmaking. After making her first financed short, she wrote and directed Silent Grace in 2004, her well-received debut feature dramatising the little-known story of female Republican prisoners’ Dirty Protest at Armagh Gaol in 1980.

Ten minutes long but intended as a prelude to a full length film, St Pancras Sunrise emerged from an atmospheric night shoot on the streets of King’s Cross unencumbered by a large film crew and lighting equipment. The fresh-faced protagonist, aspiring musician Blathnaid (Emma Eliza Regan), walks expectantly down the station steps carrying her suitcase and guitar, away from the bright lights and into the gloom of the backstreets, where she first meets Nadine (Sibylla Meienberg).

“Blathnaid is a young woman alone walking into the belly of the beast, the whole huge swirl of the place,” explains Maeve. “The location is as important as the actor and I have always found King’s Cross incredibly cinematic.

“I learnt from Ken Loach how you can capture a sense of realism using documentary techniques, that you don’t need lights, you just need street light, and you need a director of photography [in this case, Bani Mendy] who’s got courage and doesn’t mind being on the street. It was a liberating experience and the actors loved the semi-improvisational feel.”

The film, Maeve’s ninth to date, was completed last year and has already proved remarkably successful, hoovering up eight awards on the festival circuit, including best short film at
London International Screenwriters and Silicon Beach in Hollywood.

On the strength of this, Maeve has been offered part funding from Screen Ireland and Northern Ireland Screen for the longer film she aims to make.

“I certainly didn’t expect all those awards and it is very unusual for a short film to pick up that level of interest,” she says still looking surprised. “In terms of a feature, we are not a 100 per cent there yet. It’s money from here, then money from there, so it will take a while.

“But I have to look at it like wine – it just gets better as time goes on.”