At the receptionist’s desk in Cosprop’s studio and costume warehouse, a former Kwik Fit garage, the sloping bleakness of Holloway Road is held at bay by a small chandelier, brassy lighting and a bound guest book. It’s a bit stagey, like a filmset for a cheap foreign hotel or an expensive shrink’s office, quite out of place in the real north London high street. But as the entrance to a costume house that builds worlds and people out of bits of fabric, feathers and jewels, it’s appropriate. Suspend all disbelief, ye who enter here.

Cosprop was founded by the costume designer John Bright in 1965. What began as a small collection of second-hand clothes in an old fishmonger’s shop on Gloucester Avenue has grown into an Academy Award-winning operation, dressing all varieties of period dramas fr

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