AS my eyes adjust to the gloom, I slowly take in the scene around me. Dirty dishes sit stacked in the sink, a plate of mouldy food lying on a nearby worktop. There's an old-fashioned cooking range against one wall, the paintwork in the room chipped and flaking.

Moving from the kitchen, I make my way into the narrow hallway that leads to a bedroom. It is empty save for a handful of furniture including a grubby mattress partially covered with rumpled linen. The hairs on the back of my neck prickle with a foreboding sense of fear.

Continuing along the hall, the next door reveals a small sitting room. There's a threadbare rug on dusty wooden floorboards. A black and white photograph and clutch of medical certificates hang among the torn and peeling wallpaper. A single thought resonates in my mind: something bad happened here.

Welcome to 10 Rillington Place. It was here that one of Britain's most infamous serial killers, John Reginald Christie, murdered at least eight women – including his wife Ethel – during the 1940s and 50s.

Posing as a backstreet abortionist, Christie preyed on vulnerable women, inviting victims to his flat where they were tricked into inhaling deadly carbon monoxide gas. Once unconscious, Christie would rape and strangle them.

Afterwards, he would dispose of their bodies: under the floorboards, in the back garden, in an outside washhouse and in a sealed-off kitchen alcove. Such was his apparent nonchalance, Christie reportedly even used the thigh bone of one woman to prop up his garden fence.

This isn't the real Rillington Place, of course – the actual building in the Ladbroke Grove area of London has long since been demolished due to its grisly reputation – but rather I'm on the Dumbarton set where a forthcoming BBC drama charting Christie's horrific crimes was filmed.

The three-part series will see Tim Roth, star of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, play Christie with Samantha Morton, known for her roles in Morvern Callar and Minority Report, as his wife Ethel.

Today, the cast are off filming at Bo'ness and Kinneil Railway so the hangar-like space – just across the lot from where BBC Scotland's River City is filmed – is eerily quiet save for myself and production designer Pat Campbell.

Leaning casually against the sink, Glasgow-born Pat is giving me the lowdown on what it takes to recreate a serial killer's lair. "We knew it had to be dingy, morbid and sinister," she says. "But what I didn't want to do was end up filming in grey rooms and it was about trying to get some colour and life into that."

Creating that vibe required meticulous research. Pat began by studying police photography taken at the time. "There is a lot of information about what there was in his house and quite a few stills that the police took when they came to investigate," she says. "There was a series of black and white photographs that proved useful."

Christie's sordid life was previously dramatised in the 1971 film 10 Rillington Place starring Richard Attenborough alongside John Hurt and Judy Geeson.

"The original film was a huge help," says Pat. "You research everything you can about the period, the person and any images that are available. Because this is factual there are photographs of the street, plans of the house, police stills – there is a good bank of work.

"We went down to London to try and find where Rillington Place was. There is nothing left, but it did give a feeling of the area surrounding him."

Key pieces were sourced from prop houses, architectural salvage yards and antiques shops to help dress and decorate the set. Although this, as Pat admits, was not without its challenges. "We are talking about 1938 until 1950-something so it is a difficult period and there's not an enormous amount of stock."

Equally, she was aware of not wanting items to appear too new or state-of-the-art for December 1938 when Christie and his wife first moved into their ground floor flat at Rillington Place.

"Things shouldn't be 1938 – they should be 1930," says Pat. "Back then people kept things for much longer. Then there were the war years when no one had anything, there was rationing and you had to make do with what you had. The 1950s was another poor period. So, it was about trying to make the sets interesting within those constraints."

The BBC drama will focus on two of Christie's victims Beryl Evans and her one-year-old daughter Geraldine who moved into the top floor flat of 10 Rillington Place in 1948.

The storyline examines how Christie framed Beryl's husband Timothy Evans for the murders. Evans, apparently coerced into giving a false confession, was hanged in 1950.

It took another three years for Christie to be arrested. By then, he had killed four more women, including his own wife Ethel, who he strangled in bed. Christie was convicted and hanged in 1953, aged 54.

Rillington Place has been filmed on location across Scotland, including Paisley and Glasgow. "We shot at the Western Baths swimming pool," says Pat. "Another day we were down at West Princes Street filming there and at West Street using that as the link between Rillington Place and the rest of Ladbroke Grove."

Drymen-based Pat, who studied at Glasgow School of Art, designed the original River City set back in 2001/02.

Over the past 35 years she has worked on films and TV shows including mostly recently What We Did On Our Holiday, starring David Tennant, Rosamund Pike and Billy Connolly, and BBC series Wolf Hall.

Outside in what is usually the car park, a replica exterior of Rillington Place has been built right down to the dark green door of No. 10. You could imagine tapping the rusted knocker and a bespectacled Christie owlishly peering out through one of the windows.

I'm curious how Pat gets inside the head of a character when devising set ideas? "It depends on the production," she says. "Christie is a psychopath, so that is tricky. I don't think you ever get inside his head.

"He was disgusting. A lot of his surroundings dictated what we did. For example, we knew he had pornography and stashes of horrible things. That was probably enough direction. When Ethel dies – when he kills her – the house just falls to pieces around him."

Rillington Place begins on BBC One, Tuesday, 9pm