In this guide
London is the most filmed city in Europe and most of its locations are ordinary streets you can walk down for nothing. The pleasure is in the mismatch: Gringotts is a working embassy, Sherlock’s flat is on the wrong road entirely, and the Shanghai hotel pool in Skyfall is in Canary Wharf.
💡 The Short Version: Australia House is Gringotts and you cannot go in. North Gower Street is Sherlock’s Baker Street. Aldersgate Street has the Slough House door. Leadenhall Market is Diagon Alley. And Rules in Covent Garden is Bond’s favourite restaurant, written into Spectre.
📘 How we choose these (editorial note). No paid placements. These are drawn from a wide spread of sources rather than any single list - the food and travel press, the big listings sites, independent blogs and specialists, video, and what Londoners recommend themselves - and cross-referenced against each other. Locations are the ones confirmed by production credits, location agencies or the films themselves. Several are private or working buildings — we say which, and none of this is an invitation to trespass.
Where they are
| If you are near… | What was filmed there |
|---|---|
| The City | Slow Horses, Snatch, Harry Potter (Leadenhall) |
| Clerkenwell | Batman — Gotham police station |
| Covent Garden & Strand | Harry Potter (Gringotts), Spectre (Rules), Notting Hill (The Savoy) |
| Bloomsbury | Sherlock |
| Bethnal Green | Snatch |
| Canary Wharf | Skyfall, 28 Weeks Later, Layer Cake |
| Camden & Primrose Hill | Paddington |
| Greenwich | Les Misérables, The Crown, Thor |
| Regent’s Park | The Gentlemen, Slow Horses |
| Notting Hill | Notting Hill — the blue door, the bookshop, Rosmead Garden |
Harry Potter
Gringotts Wizarding Bank — Australia House, Strand
Exterior only
The ornate banking hall of Australia House played Gringotts in the first film, chandeliers and marble intact, because the production wanted a room that already looked like inherited wealth.
It is a real working High Commission, so the interior is not open to visitors and no amount of asking changes that. Occasional Open House London weekends in September are the only realistic way in, and they are balloted.
The exterior on the Strand is free to look at at any hour, and it is a two-minute walk from Somerset House below — do the two together, since the Bond tank chase happened in the courtyard round the corner. Strand WC2B 4LA, with Temple and Covent Garden about five minutes away in either direction.
Leadenhall Market, City of London
Free
An 1881 covered market in cream, maroon and green wrought iron, used for Diagon Alley in the first film. The blue door that served as the entrance to the Leaky Cauldron belongs to what is now an opticians on Bull’s Head Passage.
The painted ironwork and glass roof needed no set dressing at all, which is why it reads as a set even when you are standing in it.
Free to walk through and roofed, so it works in rain. The catch is the City rhythm: the shops and bars keep weekday hours, so it is at its most atmospheric on a weekday evening around six, and close to dead on a Sunday when half the shutters are down. Gracechurch Street EC3V 1LT, two minutes from Bank or Monument.
Platform 9¾, King’s Cross
Free
The trolley embedded in a wall, with a permanent queue, a staff member to swing the scarf and a photographer to sell you the result.
The on-screen barrier was actually shot between platforms 4 and 5, and the trolley sits in the western departures concourse, nowhere near either. Both facts are true and the queue does not care.
Free to look at, and free to photograph yourself — the paid photographer is optional and the staff will use your own phone. Expect a long wait at weekends and in school holidays; first thing in the morning is the only reliably quiet slot. The shop beside it needs no ticket and no queue.
King’s Cross station N1C 4AP, and it is inside the barrier-free part of the concourse, so you do not need a train ticket to reach it.
The Millennium Bridge — Bankside
Free · open at all times
Destroyed by Death Eaters in the opening minutes of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009), writhing and collapsing into the Thames while Muggle London watches.
It survived in reality, and the walk across it gives the best straight-on view of St Paul’s in the city — the bridge was deliberately aligned on the dome, which is why the shot works.
Free and open at all times, two minutes from Tate Modern and five from St Paul’s, and it is the single easiest location on this page to fit into a day you were having anyway. SE1 9JE.
It is also busiest at exactly the times it photographs best — go early on a weekday if you want the axis to yourself, since by mid-morning at a weekend you are photographing a crowd.
Claremont Square — Islington
Free · viewable from the pavement
12 Grimmauld Place was a set built at Leavesden, but it was modelled on this Georgian terrace above the Angel, which is why the square looks so familiar and so slightly wrong at the same time.
The centre of the square is a covered Victorian reservoir behind railings, which explains the odd raised bank of grass rising above street level — it is not a garden, it is a water tank with turf on it.
A private residential square, so this is a pavement visit. Look from the street, keep the noise down and do not photograph through windows, because people live here and get a steady trickle of visitors. There is no marker, no plaque and nothing to buy.
Claremont Square N1 9LY, five minutes from Angel and about the same from King’s Cross — which makes it an easy add-on to Platform 9¾ rather than a trip of its own.
London Zoo’s Reptile House — Regent’s Park
Ticketed · inside the zoo
Where Harry discovers he can talk to snakes and Dudley ends up behind the glass, in the Philosopher’s Stone (2001). The 1927 Reptile House is still in use and still recognisable.
It is inside the zoo, so it needs a full paid ticket — and London Zoo is one of the more expensive attractions in the city, with no partial or grounds-only entry. Worth it if you were going anyway; not worth it for the scene alone, which is the honest answer and the one most guides avoid giving.
If you do go, the Reptile House is a short walk from the main entrance and there is a plaque marking the enclosure used in the film. Outer Circle NW1 4RY, with Camden Town about fifteen minutes’ walk and Regent’s Park about the same.
Bond
Rules, Covent Garden
Open · book a table
London’s oldest restaurant, trading since 1798, written into Spectre as Bond’s own regular — M meets him here, and the film makes no attempt to disguise the room.
Game is the speciality, hung and served in season from the restaurant’s own estate in the Pennines — grouse from mid-August, then partridge, pheasant and venison through the autumn, which is the time of year to come if the food rather than the film is the point.
Book, and book well ahead. It is small, heavily panelled and consistently full, walk-ins are optimistic, and the ground-floor room is the one from the film. Expect proper prices — this is a special-occasion restaurant that happens to be a location, not the other way round.
It is in Covent Garden, a few minutes from the piazza, and the frontage alone is worth the detour if you are not eating.
Skyfall’s “Shanghai” pool — Four Seasons, Canary Wharf
Hotel
Bond’s Shanghai hotel pool, all glass and neon reflections, was filmed at the Four Seasons in Canary Wharf — a very London kind of substitution, using the one part of the city that could pass for a Chinese financial district.
It is a working hotel pool, so access means being a guest or booking into the spa — there is no viewing, no day pass to the pool alone, and turning up to look is not a thing that happens.
The lobby is public and the towers outside are the more honest photograph anyway: Canary Wharf standing in for Shanghai works precisely because the exteriors do the job, and those are free.
Westferry Circus E14 8RS, five minutes from Canary Wharf station — and Bōkan’s rooftop, three streets away, gives you the same skyline from above without a hotel booking.
Somerset House — Strand
Free courtyard · exhibitions ticketed
Bond drives a tank through St Petersburg in GoldenEye (1995) — in a courtyard three minutes’ walk from Waterloo Bridge. The neoclassical facades passed for Russian imperial architecture, so the production never left London.
The courtyard is free and open daily, and it changes character completely by season: fifty-five dancing fountains you can walk through in summer, and an ice rink from mid-November to early January. Exhibitions inside are ticketed and separate.
Stand in the middle and the substitution makes sense immediately — the courtyard is enclosed on all four sides, so there is no modern London in the frame in any direction. That is the whole reason the production never left the country.
Strand WC2R 1LA, with Temple two minutes away and Covent Garden five, and the river terrace at the back is also free.
The National Gallery — Trafalgar Square
Free
Bond meets Q on a bench in front of Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire in Skyfall (2012) — a warship being towed away to be broken up, which makes the film’s point about obsolescence without anyone having to say it.
The painting is on permanent display and free to see, with no ticket and no booking, and the gallery opens late one evening a week — by far the best time to come, because the room empties and you can actually sit on the bench.
Ask at the desk for the Turner rooms rather than hunting; staff get asked constantly and will point you straight there. The bench in the scene is a normal gallery bench and it is still in front of the painting.
Trafalgar Square WC2N 5DN, two minutes from Charing Cross, and it costs nothing to walk in and see one painting and leave, which is a perfectly respectable way to use this building.
The Treasury Building — Great George Street
Free to view from the street
The Edwardian government block off Whitehall stands in for the security establishment Bond spends Spectre (2015) fighting.
The building is not open to the public and never has been, so this is a street-level look at a facade — which is all the film uses it for too.
The reason to make the walk is what is underneath: the Churchill War Rooms occupy the basement of the same block, preserved as they were left in 1945. They are ticketed, they sell out, and they are worth booking ahead rather than turning up — the queue on the door regularly exceeds an hour in summer.
Great George Street SW1P 3AL, three minutes from Westminster, and St James’s Park is the quieter approach.
Television
Slough House — Aldersgate Street, City of London
Free · exterior
The grubby door the slow horses trudge through in nearly every episode is a real one, on the corner of Aldersgate Street opposite the Barbican. The interiors — the damp, the piles of paper, Lamb’s office — are a set built elsewhere.
Free to see from the pavement, at any time. It is an unremarkable doorway above an Italian restaurant on the corner of Aldersgate and Carthusian Street, which is exactly the point — the joke of the show is that the worst posting in the Service is behind a door nobody would look at twice.
126 Aldersgate Street EC1A 4JQ, two minutes from Barbican station. Combine it with Smithfield and the Farmiloe Building further down this page, both within five minutes, and the Charterhouse is on the same corner if you want something to actually go inside.
Sherlock’s 221B — North Gower Street, Bloomsbury
Free · exterior
The BBC filmed its 221B exterior here rather than on the real, much busier Baker Street — a Bloomsbury terrace standing in for Marylebone, largely because the real Baker Street could not be closed off for a shoot.
Speedy’s Sandwich Bar & Café next door is real, open and trading, and it leaned into the connection rather than resenting it. It keeps normal daytime cafe hours, so the correct way to do this location is to go in and buy a coffee rather than photograph a stranger’s front door from the pavement.
187 North Gower Street NW1 2NJ, three minutes from Euston Square and five from Euston. The flat itself is private.
The Crown’s Buckingham Palace — Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich
Grounds free
Wren’s riverside campus stands in for Buckingham Palace’s exterior and courtyard throughout The Crown — the real palace does not allow filming, so almost every screen version of it is somewhere else.
The same buildings have played 1830s Paris in Les Misérables, Asgard in Thor: The Dark World, and the Italian cafe where Alfred spots Bruce Wayne at the end of The Dark Knight Rises. It is the most-filmed building in London by a distance, so you will recognise it from several things at once.
The grounds are free and open daily; the Painted Hall and the Chapel are ticketed separately. Allow an hour for the grounds alone, and combine it with the Cutty Sark five minutes away and the free Greenwich Park panorama ten minutes uphill.
King William Walk SE10 9NN. Cutty Sark DLR is the nearest, or arrive by river — the boat from Westminster takes about an hour and is the better approach.
Sherlock’s fall — St Bartholomew’s Hospital, Smithfield
Free to view · working hospital
Sherlock jumps from the roof of the pathology block and lands on the pavement below in The Reichenbach Fall (2012). Fans left so many notes on the wall and the phone box outside that the hospital had to manage it.
Barts is also the oldest hospital in Britain still on its original site, founded in 1123. The exterior and the square are public; the small museum keeps limited hours. It is a working hospital, so keep out of the way of patients.
Guy Ritchie’s London
Snatch’s Pawn Shop and Tailor, Bethnal Green
Free · exteriors
Several genuine East End addresses, including Bethnal Green Town Hall as Franky Four Fingers’s tailor — the Edwardian civic building is now a hotel, and you can walk into the bar and stand in the shot.
Exteriors are free to see at any time, and the town hall is the one worth the trip: it is now the Town Hall Hotel, and the bar and restaurant are open to non-residents, so you can sit inside the shot rather than looking at it.
The pawn shop was at 88 Teesdale Street E2 0AA and the frontage was dressed for filming and has since reverted, so it takes some finding and there is nothing to mark it. This one is for people who already like the film.
Bethnal Green station is five minutes from both, and Columbia Road and Brick Lane are a short walk north and east if you want the trip to be about more than a doorway.
Snatch’s Diamond Store, Hatton Garden
Free
Doug the Head’s diamond shop sits on Hatton Garden, London’s real diamond district — Ritchie did not have to invent a setting, because roughly three hundred jewellery businesses genuinely trade on and around this one street.
Free, and best on a weekday when the shops are open and the street is actually working — at a weekend the shutters are down and it is one of the deadest streets in central London.
The shop used in the film is Premier House, 12-13 Hatton Garden EC1N 8AN, a working commercial building you look at from the pavement. Doug the Head’s local in the film, Ye Olde Mitre, is a genuine seventeenth-century pub a couple of doors away down an alley off the street — it is easy to miss and worth not missing.
Farringdon and Chancery Lane are both about five minutes. The same stretch played Greenwich Village in Eyes Wide Shut — see below.
Feng Shang Princess, Regent’s Canal
Open · a restaurant
The floating Chinese pagoda appears in The Gentlemen and as a backdrop in Slow Horses, and it is a genuinely odd object to come across on a canal — three tiers of red and gold moored permanently at Cumberland Basin, in service since 1983.
It is a working restaurant, and you can book a table on it, which makes it one of very few locations on this page you can eat inside. Cantonese, with dim sum at lunch. It does not open every day, so check before walking out there.
Cumberland Basin, Prince Albert Road, about ten minutes from Camden Town — and you pass it anyway on the towpath walk between Little Venice and Camden Lock, which is the best way to arrive.
A floating pagoda moored at Cumberland Basin. You pass it on the canal walk between Little Venice and Camden. Photo: Jim Linwood, CC BY 2.0.
Horror and comedy
The Winchester — Duke of Albany, New Cross
Free · exterior only, and not a pub any more
The pub Shaun and Ed barricade themselves in for the finale of Shaun of the Dead (2004) was a real one: the Duke of Albany, on Monson Road in New Cross. It closed in 2008 and was converted into flats, so there is no pub to visit — just the building, recognisable from the film but now somebody’s front door.
The building used as the Winchester, now flats. The corner windows and the roofline are the giveaway.
⚠️ Do not turn up expecting a pint. This is a residential building. Look from the street and move on.
Notting Hill
Four addresses within fifteen minutes of each other, and the one part of this guide where the most-published fact is wrong more often than it is right.
The blue door — 280 Westbourne Park Road
Free · exterior only, and it is somebody’s front door
William Thacker’s flat, and the most photographed doorway in west London. Screenwriter Richard Curtis owned the real house and lived behind that door; it was auctioned for charity after the film, and when the new owners repainted it a different colour so many people turned up confused that it went back to blue.
Photographed 5 September 2026. Someone has sprayed the door in red paint and it has not been cleaned off — worth knowing before you make the trip.
⚠️ People live here. It is a private flat on an ordinary street. Photograph from the pavement and do not sit on the step, however many others are doing exactly that.
The travel bookshop that was filmed — 142 Portobello Road
Free · a gift shop you can walk into
This is the shopfront in the film, and it was an antiques arcade at the time it was shot — the interior was built elsewhere. It has been a shoe shop, a store called Notting Hill from 2006, and a gift shop since 2014, which now paints THE TRAVEL BOOK Co across the fascia and puts a board outside explaining the whole history.
The board on the left sets out the shop’s claim: the only location where exterior scenes of the bookshop were filmed.
The bookshop that inspired it — 13 Blenheim Crescent
Free · a real working bookshop
Nothing was filmed here. The Travel Bookshop that gave Curtis the idea traded on Blenheim Crescent for about thirty years and closed in 2011; it reopened as The Notting Hill Bookshop and sells books to this day.
Most guides merge these two addresses into one shop. They are ten minutes apart and they are different things: Portobello Road is where the camera was, Blenheim Crescent is where the idea came from. Visit both — they are a short walk apart and the second one will actually sell you a book.
Rosmead Garden — Rosmead Road
Free to look at · you cannot go in
The private communal garden William and Anna climb into, in the scene with the bench. It is a keyholders’ garden for the surrounding houses, permanently locked, marked only by a small oval plaque on the gate.
⚠️ There is no public access, and there never has been. You look through the railings. Rosmead Road itself is a good-looking street, which softens the blow.
If you came for the houses rather than the film, the pastel streets are mapped in walking order in our Notting Hill colourful houses route.
Batman and dystopia
Gotham City Police Station — Farmiloe Building, Clerkenwell
Exterior only
A grand Victorian former lead-manufacturing warehouse on St John Street, used for Gotham City Police Department interiors in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises. The cast-iron galleries and top light did the work that would otherwise have cost a set.
Exterior only and privately owned. It spent years derelict, which is precisely why film crews could get inside it — an empty Victorian warehouse with cast-iron galleries and a glazed roof is a free set. It has since been redeveloped, so what you see from the street is the shell rather than the rooms, and the interiors are gone as film locations.
28-36 St John Street EC1M 4AY, five minutes from Farringdon and about the same from Barbican. Smithfield Market is across the road and the Slough House doorway is a five-minute walk, so all three fit into one loop.
28 Weeks Later — Isle of Dogs
Free
The Isle of Dogs plays “District 1”, the US-military quarantine zone where survivors are resettled. Water on three sides and a wall of towers made the isolation plausible without a single effect shot.
The production also got permission to close central London at dawn for the empty-city sequences — the same trick as the first film, and the reason both look like nobody faked anything.
Free and open at all times. The DLR is the way to do it: ride it from Bank through Canary Wharf to Island Gardens, sit at the front where the driver would be, and the elevated track gives you the film’s geography in about twelve minutes for the price of a normal fare.
The South Quay footbridge is the specific structure used for the quarantine-zone crossing, and the Greenwich Foot Tunnel at the southern tip is used in a chase sequence in the same film — free, open around the clock, with lifts now running 24 hours.
Paddington
The Brown family home — Primrose Hill
Free · a residential street
The fictional 32 Windsor Gardens is a pastel-painted Primrose Hill crescent — Chalcot Crescent, which also supplied Phoenix Buchanan’s house in the sequel from the opposite side of the same square. There is no marker and no blue front door; the paintwork was done for the film.
It is a private residential street. Look from the pavement, do not linger outside individual houses, and do not knock — the residents field this every weekend. Chalk Farm is five minutes away and Primrose Hill itself, with its protected view over the city, is two streets on, which is a better reason to be here.
There is also a Paddington Bear trail around Paddington station, free and self-guided, and a statue on the concourse by platform 1 — that one is genuinely worth going to, and it costs nothing.
Blockbusters
The Old Royal Naval College — Greenwich
Free grounds · Painted Hall ticketed
Thor and Malekith fight through Wren’s colonnades in the finale of Thor: The Dark World (2013), and Greenwich plays itself rather than standing in for anywhere — unusual for a Marvel film.
The same buildings have doubled for Paris, St Petersburg and Gotham elsewhere, which is why the finale feels oddly familiar even to people who have never been.
The grounds are free and open daily, and you can walk the colonnades the fight runs through without paying anything. The Painted Hall is ticketed and worth it on its own terms — Thornhill spent nineteen years on the ceiling, and the price includes a hand mirror so you can look up without wrecking your neck.
King William Walk SE10 9NN. Allow an hour for the grounds, two if you go inside, and the Cutty Sark and the free Greenwich Park viewpoint are both within ten minutes.
Trafalgar Square — Westminster
Free · open at all times
Dressed as 1918 London for the Armistice celebrations that close Wonder Woman (2017).
The square has appeared as itself in more productions than almost anywhere else in London, and it also played the march on Parliament in V for Vendetta — different film, same paving.
Free and always open, with no gates and nothing to book. The National Gallery on the north side is free too, and holds the Turner from Skyfall — see above — so the two locations are ninety seconds apart and neither costs anything.
WC2N 5DN, two minutes from Charing Cross. The fourth plinth changes commission every couple of years, so the square is rarely quite the same twice.
Canary Wharf Underground Station — Isle of Dogs
Free to walk through
Norman Foster’s cathedral-scale ticket hall played an Imperial facility in Rogue One (2016), and needed almost no set dressing beyond the lighting — the concrete vaults already look like something the Empire would have built.
A working Jubilee line station, so you need a valid fare to be on the platforms — but the ticket hall itself is before the gateline and free to walk through, which is the part that appears on screen.
Quietest at weekends, when the Wharf empties out and you can actually photograph the vaults without a commuter in every frame. Weekday mornings are the worst possible time.
The station sits under Canada Square Park, so you surface into the towers, and Bōkan and the Four Seasons pool from Skyfall are both within a few minutes if you are collecting locations.
Blackfriars Bridge — City of London
Free · open at all times
Tom Cruise runs along the top of the bridge in the chase that ends at Tate Modern in Mission: Impossible — Fallout (2018), having already run across the roof of Blackfriars station.
The best view of the run is from the Thames Path on the south bank, looking north — you get the bridge, the station roof he crosses first, and St Paul’s behind it in one frame, which is more or less the shot the film uses.
Free and open at all times, and it is a five-minute walk from Tate Modern where the chase ends, so the whole sequence is walkable in about fifteen minutes. Blackfriars is the only station on the Thames with entrances on both banks, which is itself worth knowing.
The Millennium Bridge is three minutes upstream, so the Harry Potter and Mission: Impossible locations pair naturally.
London playing somewhere else
Hatton Garden — Clerkenwell
Free · a working street
Kubrick would not fly to New York, so American shopfronts and a payphone were added to this stretch of London’s jewellery quarter to turn it into Greenwich Village for Eyes Wide Shut (1999), where Tom Cruise’s character is followed through the night.
It is the clearest example in the city of London standing in for somewhere else entirely. Nothing marks it — it is a working street of jewellers, open in shop hours and busy on weekdays. The same street appears in Snatch below, as itself.
The British Museum — Bloomsbury
Free
The museum sequence in The Mummy Returns (2001) was filmed at the museum itself — though the exterior shots used UCL’s front quad up the road, because the real facade was behind scaffolding at the time. Two Bloomsbury buildings, one museum, in the same film.
Free and open daily, with no ticket for the permanent collection and no booking needed. Use the Montague Place entrance at the back to skip the queue on Great Russell Street — it is the same building and usually walk-straight-in, and almost nobody knows it exists.
The Egyptian sculpture gallery on the ground floor is where the film’s museum scenes read from, and it is immediately left of the Great Court, so you can be in the shot within two minutes of coming through the door.
Great Russell Street WC1B 3DG. Tottenham Court Road, Holborn and Russell Square are all about five minutes, and Friday is the late night.
Paddington Station — Paddington
Free to walk through
Eloise steps off the train from Cornwall under Brunel’s roof at the start of Last Night in Soho (2021), before the film begins its slow turn from wonder to dread.
The same shed appears in both Paddington films, for reasons that need no explanation.
Free to walk through and open around the clock — the concourse is outside the ticket barriers, so you need no fare to stand under Brunel’s 1854 roof. The Paddington Bear statue sits on platform 1, near the Praed Street end, and there is a small shop beside it; both are free to reach.
Go at the wrong time and you are photographing a rush-hour crowd. Mid-morning or after eight in the evening is when the roof reads properly, and the ironwork is best seen from the raised walkway at the Bishop’s Bridge Road end.
W2 1HQ, and the Elizabeth line entrance is a separate, much newer hall that appears in nothing.
Parliament Square — Westminster
Free · open at all times
Bridge Street and Parliament Street were closed overnight to film the masked crowd converging on Westminster in V for Vendetta (2005).
The mask has since escaped the film entirely and turns up at real protests in the same square, which is a strange loop for a location to close.
Free and always open, with no gates — though the square is often partly fenced for works, ceremonies or demonstrations, and the pavement around Parliament itself is subject to short-notice closures, so a specific shot is never guaranteed.
The statues around the edge are the reason to linger: Churchill, Mandela, Gandhi and, since 2018, Millicent Fawcett — the first woman commemorated here, and the only statue in the square made by a woman.
SW1P 3BD, two minutes from Westminster station, and the Suffragette and Spectre locations are both within a five-minute walk.
📅 Addresses and access notes checked against our own location records and the venues’ own sites on 2 September 2026. Several of these are private homes or working offices — where that is the case we say so rather than implying you can go in.
What it costs
Almost all of it is free, because a filming location is usually just a street.
- Free and public: Leadenhall Market, Millennium Bridge, Borough Market, the South Bank, St Pancras, Notting Hill’s streets and almost every exterior in this guide.
- Ticketed: the Warner Bros. Studio Tour at Leavesden is the expensive one and needs booking weeks ahead — and it is a studio tour rather than a location. Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross is free to look at; the photograph with the trolley and scarf is the paid part, and the queue is long.
- Working buildings. Several locations here are private homes, offices or churches. Exteriors are fair game; do not go in.
- Guided film tours run £20–£40 and are mostly worth skipping — the locations are easy to find yourself and the guides rarely know more than the internet does.
What to know
- Almost all of these are free because almost all are streets and exteriors.
- Australia House and the Farmiloe Building are working buildings. Exterior views only.
- Primrose Hill’s Paddington crescent is residential. Be considerate.
- Leadenhall Market never actually closes — the arcade is a public thoroughfare. The shops and bars inside keep City hours, so weekdays are when it is fully alive, though weekend pop-up markets now run there too.
- The City cluster — Slough House, Leadenhall, Hatton Garden, the Farmiloe Building — is walkable in under an hour.
Continue planning your London trip
- 🎨 London’s Street Art and Banksys
- 🎪 Free Things to Do in London
- 🏛️ Historic Houses in London
- 🏙️ City of London Area Guide
- 🎭 Covent Garden Area Guide
- ⛵ Greenwich Area Guide
Common questions
Where was Harry Potter filmed in London?
Gringotts Wizarding Bank is the banking hall of Australia House on the Strand — a working diplomatic building, so you cannot go in. Platform 9¾ is at King's Cross, Leadenhall Market played Diagon Alley, and the Millennium Bridge is destroyed in Half-Blood Prince.
Is Sherlock's 221B Baker Street real?
The BBC series filmed its 221B exterior on North Gower Street in Bloomsbury, not Baker Street — the real one was too busy. The Sherlock Holmes Museum at 221b Baker Street is a separate, unrelated attraction.
Where is Slough House from Slow Horses?
The grubby door the slow horses trudge through in nearly every episode is real, on the corner of Aldersgate Street in the City. The interiors are a set.
Can you visit these filming locations?
Most are streets, bridges and building exteriors, so yes and for free. Australia House and the Farmiloe Building are working buildings you can only see from outside. Rules restaurant is open and you can book Bond's table.
What is the best filming location walk in London?
The City has the highest concentration — Slough House on Aldersgate, the Gotham police station in Clerkenwell, Leadenhall Market for Diagon Alley and two Banksy Basquiats in the same tunnel, all within half an hour on foot.
