Ah, London. There’s no place like it in the minds of many, not least Johnny Depp’s Sweeney Todd, though his reasoning may not be quite the message the tourist board are after. Since the advent of the motion picture, it’s provided a backdrop for films ranging from the comic to the dramatic, the grounded to the other-worldly. It’s played itself as often as it’s played other cities, both real and imagined.
To celebrate the wealth of filmmaking past, present and future that has taken place in the capital, RT thought it high time to take a cinematic trip around the busy city and point you in the direction of some familiar locations from the annals of film history. Follow in the footsteps of everyone from Mick Jagger to Charlie Croker and from Natalie Portman to Bridget Jones as we take an eclectic look at 10 of London’s more memorable cinema backdrops.
For more locations like this, check out the interactive location map at the Industry Trust’s Connected to British Film and TV website.
A Clockwork Orange
The grey concrete brutalism of Thamesmead South housing estate, a prime piece of 1960s urban planning, made it ideal for the stamping grounds of the droogs in A Clockwork Orange. ‘Municipal Flat Block 18A, Linear North’, where Alex (Malcolm McDowell) lives, is the Tavy Bridge Centre. And the stretch of water into which Alex pitches his friends when he wants to teach them a lesson which will be returned with interest is the artificially-created Southmere Lake. The fight scene takes place on Binsey Walk.
Shaun of the Dead
The Winchester pub, with a working rifle hung above the bar, is the hang-out of Muswell Hill/Crouch End slacker Shaun (Simon Pegg). However, the actual pub exterior is the Duke of Albany in New Cross Gate, SE14, well South of the film’s N8/N10 setting. Shaun’s flat, though, is in Nelson Road N8, and the newsagent he trudges to with a hangover is indeed just round the corner on Weston Park.
Bridget Jones’s Diary
Though Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones lives in Holland Park, that was a bit out of the budget-range of the film locations finder, so Renee Zellweger’s flat in Bridget Jones’s Diary is in Borough Market SE1, handily atop the Globe Pub, Bedale Street. The Bridget Jones films offer a tour of modern literary London, with a book launch at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (on the Mall), girlie lunches at the Tate Modern Restaurant and a snog under the walkways at Shad Thames.
A Hard Days’ Night
Much of the Beatles’s debut feature was shot in the Scala Theatre on Tottenham Street, W1 — the major concert takes place on the site of what is now Scala House, an upscale block of flats (an exterior scene using a fire escape was shot at what is now the London Apollo, Hammersmith). Besides passing off Marylebone Station as Liverpool, the film traipses around London as Ringo goes walkabout on Lancaster Road and Putney Towpath before having a pub lunch in the Turk’s Head, Winchester Road.
The Italian Job
The prison Charlie Croker (Michael Caine) is released from at the beginning of The Italian Job is Wormwood Scrubs in Du Cane Road, East Acton. It’s a familiar, much-used location — seen in Hitchcock’s Frenzy, Billy Liar, Sweeney 2, Adventures of a Plumber’s Mate, Morgan — A Suitable Case for Treatment and many others. The interior, though, is Dublin’s disused Kilmainham Jail.
The Long Good Friday
Not the least achievement of The Long Good Friday is its prescience about the redevelopment of London Dockland in the 1980s — though presumably gangster Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) was by then too dead to cash in on it. Shand’s chosen site is St. Katherine’s Dock (also seen in To the Devil — A Daughter), then nearly derelict, now suitably upmarket.
The Omen
It’s impossible to walk past All Saints, Fulham, without humming ‘Ave Satane’ and looking up nervously for any loose lightning rods. It’s the church the derelict ex-priest (Patrick Troughton) where seeks sanctuary in The Omen, only to be skewered by that falling lightning rod.
Performance
Pop star Turner (Mick Jagger) and gangster Charlie (James Fox) meld identities in a psychedelic fugue in Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s classic, which epitomises swinging London decadence. Turner’s mansion pad is supposed to be at 81 Powis Square, W11, though the exterior used in the film is 25 Powis Square, and the interior is 23 Lowndes Square, Knightsbridge.
The 39 Steps
In the climax of Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) gets up and asks ‘Mr Memory’ the one question he doesn’t want to answer (‘what are the thirty-nine steps?’) and the performer gets shot from a box seat by the stump-fingered mastermind of the spy ring. Hitchcock uses the real London Palladium in Argyll Street, a famous variety venue which is still in business.
Closer
Jude Law and Natalie Portman meet in Postman’s Park, Edward St, EC1, in front of a wall of plaques commemorating those who have lost their lives trying to save others. Thirteen of the plaques are the work of the Victorian artist G.F. Watts, whose idea the memorial was. Patrick Marber was inspired by the park to write the original play, and stage productions have recreated the plaques — so filming here brought Closer back to its origin.
For more locations like this, check out the interactive location map at the Industry Trust’s Connected to British Film and TV website.
