Movie London - Dead Ringers II
I’ve already blogged how London is used as a dead ringer for foreign locations in film. But equally, many London locations which are film-friendly are used to stand in for other more famous sites.
The photo above shows why film makers are not going to use number 10, Downing Street as a location. You can’t get anywhere near it - the whole road is blocked off by those high iron barriers and gates. So it should be no surprise that other places in London have worked as stand-ins for Number Ten.
45 Upper Grosvenor Street provided the interior of Number 10 in The Queen, recently. But you can bet that most of the time, when you see Number 10 in film or on TV, it’s been mocked up in the Studio.
Clubland has seen a number of substitutions. Confusingly, the Institute of Directors has been the Reform Club (in Around the world in 80 Days), Claridges Hotel (An Ideal Husband), and even moved continents to become the Viceroy’s Palace in Gandhi. Meanwhile the Reform Club, which wasn’t allowed a role as itself in Around the World, took over the identity of the Athenaueum in O Lucky Man.
Battersea Park is very film-friendly, and for that reason it’s often used as a ‘generic’ London park, standing in for others where the cameras aren’t allowed. It’s been Hyde Park in Wilde, St James’s in 101 Dalmatians, and Clapham Common in The End of the Affair.
Barton Street, Westminster has starred in Sherlock Holmes films as Baker Street. Number 221b Baker Streetwas 9 Barton Street in the spoof ‘Without a Clue’, and 3 Barton Street took on the job in ‘Murder by Decree’. (221b Baker Street, of course, is a fictional address, so technically, these buildings are stand-ins for somewhere that never existed.) If you’re tracking down Sherlock Holmes in London, remember to visit these two houses - as well as the museum in Baker Street.
Sometimes, the changing face of London means that the original landmarks can’t be used any longer. Once the market had moved out of central London and the buildings had been turned into a retail mall, Covent Garden was impossible to use as the set for a real market. So Richard Attenborough used Smithfield instead in his biopic Chaplin. Anyone who knows London well can easily recognise the difference - but the substitute does deliver the authentic market feel.
As usual in my movie postings, all my information comes from Tony Reeves’s ‘Movie London’.
Below - Downing Street as film makers would like to film it….
Photo credit: Downing Street today - Sergio Alvarez, Downing Street in 1977 - Steve Swayne, both on Flickr
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