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Britain has always punched above its weight as a film set. The castles, the countryside, the Georgian terraces, the ancient harbours. It turns out that centuries of architecture and landscape make for remarkably convincing backdrops, and Hollywood has known this for a very long time. Here are some of the most visited real-life locations behind Britain's most beloved productions.
Harry Potter
The films raided the UK's architectural back catalogue comprehensively, and the results are scattered from London to the Scottish Highlands. In London, King's Cross Station provides Platform 9¾, Leadenhall Market doubled as Diagon Alley, and the Millennium Bridge meets a memorable end courtesy of the Death Eaters. Durham Cathedral and Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire stood in for Hogwarts' interiors, while Alnwick Castle in Northumberland was the real-world Hogwarts for the early films. In Scotland, the Glenfinnan Viaduct, which you cross on our Loch Ness & Glenfinnan Viaduct tour from Edinburgh, is where the Hogwarts Express makes its most famous appearance. The landscape around Glencoe provided Hagrid's Hut and the wider grounds.
Bridgerton
Netflix's Regency drama had an obvious solution to its need for period architecture: Bath. The Royal Crescent and the Assembly Rooms feature prominently, and Bath's Georgian streetscapes are so convincingly of-the-period that the production required minimal intervention. Both are easily explored on our Cotswolds, Bath & Stonehenge tour from London. Elsewhere, Wilton House in Wiltshire served as the Duke's London residence, Hampton Court Palace as Queen Charlotte's court, and Castle Howard in Yorkshire as the Duke and Duchess of Hastings' country seat.
Bridget Jones
The London scenes are grounded in Borough Market. Bridget's flat sits above The Globe Tavern, a short stumble from the market itself, with the Royal Courts of Justice and the riverside at Shad Thames completing the picture. For the Christmas countryside scenes, the production headed to Snowshill in Gloucestershire, a village in the Cotswolds that delivers exactly the kind of impossibly pretty English rural backdrop the script required.
Clarkson's Farm
Diddly Squat Farm near Chadlington in Oxfordshire is exactly where it appears to be: a real working farm, owned and operated by Clarkson, in the heart of the Cotswolds. The farm shop is open to visitors, The Farmer's Dog pub in Chipping Norton is open for business, and the surrounding landscape is as beautiful on a grey Tuesday as it is on screen. Our Clarkson's Farm tour from London takes you through the whole world of the show, without the parking stress.
Poldark
Cornwall provided almost everything the BBC's Poldark needed: dramatic clifftops, ancient mines, and working historic harbours. Charlestown, on the south Cornish coast, served as the show's principal port and remains so completely unchanged since the 18th century that it barely needed dressing. The clifftop mines at Botallack on the far west peninsula gave the series its most iconic imagery. Both locations feature on our Cornwall & Cotswolds tour from London.
Downton Abbey
Highclere Castle in Hampshire is the real Downton Abbey, a Victorian country house of the kind that exists almost nowhere else, and the village of Bampton in Oxfordshire provided the show's village scenes. Bampton is Cotswolds-adjacent, and its streets remain almost entirely as the series depicts them.
The literary landmarks
221B Baker Street is now a Sherlock Holmes museum. Haworth in Yorkshire, where the Brontë sisters lived and wrote Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, remains essentially what it was. Chatsworth House in Derbyshire served as Pemberley in the BBC's Pride and Prejudice, and the house and grounds justify the journey on their own terms regardless of the Jane Austen connection.
If any of the above takes you somewhere on our tour routes, we'd love to take you there.
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