Why Coronation Street has magical moving walls

Here on the Coronation Street Blog, regular readers will know we bring you spoilers. We bring you news. We bring you behind-the-scenes views of walls being made.  Heck, yes. There's no stopping us!

But these just aren't any old walls. They're replacement walls, made from glass fibre mouldings by Harviglass-Fibre of Cheshire. 

And if you're wondering why Corrie would have new walls made, Harviglass-Fibre were asked by ITV to create the new walls when filming switched to High Definition cameras. The original walls had been in use for many years and were beginning to show too much wear and tear on screen.

Now, close your eyes now if you don't want the magic spoiled - and don't read on!

Harvigass-Fibre told me today how these walls work when filming. 

They said: "Basically there is a row of terraced houses with a brick wall at either end. Due to the size of the yards they couldn’t fit cast & crew in a normal size yard, so they have 3 walls which slide up & down the row to create false walls (hope I’ve not spoiled the illusion!).

"We went down to site where we manufactured a mould to replicate the brick pattern of the side of Dev’s shop as it had the exact brick pattern they wanted to produce. Once this was manufactured we returned to our premises with the mould where we then manufactured timber frames to the correct size of the wall before mounting the GRP Skins onto them. They were then delivered to site where they were specialist painted by ITV to match the surrounding brickwork.They were supplied as flat skins which the ITV team fixed to the scaffolding type system you see in the pictures before again applying their specialist paint."

So there you have it. Check out Harviglass-Fibre's website and there are more images of their Corrie walls here.

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