Professor Ian Christie, a Fellow of the British Academy, is Professor of Film and Media History in the School of History of Art, Film, and Visual Media of Birkbeck College, University of London. With the establishment of major new film studios around London in the 1930s, the production design of British films took an architectural turn, influenced by distinguished immigrants such as Alfred Junge and Vincent Korda. This lecture will survey how pioneer British designers, such as Carmen Dillon, John Bryan and their pupil John Box created an 'English school' of design for the screen, which in turn supported the flowering of literary adaptation as British cinema's distinctive genre.