The London Traveler

Movie London - Dead Ends and Wormholes in Space

by Andrea on June 18th, 2008

I have to admit I’m the kind of person who really likes to track down little continuity issues when I’m watching films.  It’s a bit nerdy. Well actually it’s very nerdy.

Now when you really know London, you can get very nerdy indeed about precise locations. And that’s great fun. Tony Reeves obviously enjoys this and his book Movie London is full of the most intriguing details about London locations which have been misused in film.

For instance, in The Killing of Sister George, Beryl Reid stomps down a little passageway between Heath Street and Hampstead Grove, in north London. But she comes out on the Chelsea Embankment! Obviously, London is full of little wormholes in space that allow film characters to dematerialise from one location and materialise in another. (No, they don’t have TARDISes. Don’t be silly.)

If you know your Tube map, things get even more fun. In Green Street for instance, Elijah Wood is supposed to be going from Paddington to Chelsea, but his sister meets him at Bank Station. Bank doesn’t even share a tube line with Paddington (you have to change at Notting Hill Gate).

In Scandal, Sheba (Cate Blanchett) has a house in North London at 20 Upper Park Road - but her local pub, where she goes with Barbara (Judi Dench) is actually in Clerkenwell. That would be a 45 minute trip at the very least, by my reckoning - and Clerkenwell is a very, very different neighbourhood from genteel North London.

Shaun of the Dead also has a far-away ‘local’ -Shaun’s house was at 83 Nelson Road,in north London, and his pub the Winchester Arms is in New Cross, south of the River. I’m glad I live closer to my regular drinking place!

Philip Noyce seems to have a particularly weird idea of London geography in Patriot Games. The IRA bookshop  is in the Burlington Arcade, but the nearest tube station seems to be Aldwych, a mile away - a station that no longer operates, so he’s going to have no  luck getting a train there anyway.  The Burlington Arcade also turns up confusingly between Trafalgar Square and St James’s Park as Jeff Daniels is dragged between the two in 101 Dalmatians. 

Sometimes a room with a view turns out to have different views from front and back. In Brannigan John Wayne has his flat in York Mansions, a stunning apartment block off Prince of Wales Drive in Battersea - but when it’s blown up, you can quite clearly see the Albert Memorial though the hole in the wall.

And in 23 Paces to Baker Street, 74 Portland Place appears to have a back terrace on to the Thames. It’s nowhere near it!

Now of course some of these little misdirections just reflect the need to get a good filming location. And no one except real locals is going to spot that the pub in ‘Shaun of the Dead’ is on the wrong side of the river.

But in other cases, the whole thing is badly wrong - particularly the 101 Dalmatians scene.  Anyone who knows London would surely suss out that there’s something badly wrong there.

One last superb blooper. And then I promise I’ll shut up….In the 2007 film St Trinian’s the girls save their beloved school from bankruptcy by stealing Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Earring from the National Gallery. Guess what? You’ll look for it in vain there - it’s actually in the Mauritshuis in the Hague. With so many other famous paintings they could pinch, I do wonder why they chose one that wasn’t there at all…

Photo credit - Amanda Slater on Flickr

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