Colin Firth’s lake scene in 1995’s Pride & Prejudice is still worth £900,000 a year to Lyme Park (Image: BBC)
Three decades after a young Colin Firth emerged dripping from a pond, his white shirt clinging to his body after a spot of wild swimming in the BBC’s blockbuster adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, the location is still enjoying a near million-pound boost.
The National Trust’s glorious Lyme Park stately home and estate in Cheshire, the scene of Firth’s dip as Jane Austen’s Mr Darcy, has benefitted from a remarkable £900,000 in extra annual visitor revenues since the show was broadcast, one report found. And it’s likely to be higher this year as fans flock to Britain for the 250th anniversary of the author’s birth.
But Lyme Park isn’t alone. It’s become the norm to film in authentic locations, especially period dramas and historical documentaries, and no one has access to more historic properties than the National Trust, which has just celebrated its 130th anniversary.
More recent franchises such as Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Bridgerton and Wolf Hall have all had an equally impressive impact.
The Harry Potter moves were filmed in several National Trust properties (Image: Warner Bros)
Harvey Edgington, the Trust’s senior film and location manager, explains: “The monies we make always goes back to the property that hosted the filming and most have conservation projects sitting on a backburner waiting for funding. So when you get a swift injection of cash, that work can start – so there are real, tangible benefits.
“We also get visitors off the back of the locations once the films have gone out. On Game of Thrones, Mount Stewart in Northern Ireland stood in for Winterfell in the first two seasons. I think at the peak, we were getting about 2,000 extra visitors a week coming solely because of the Game of Thrones connection.”
The phenomenon of visiting TV locations, says Harvey, is known as “set-jetting”, and, as its name suggests, it can involve a lot of overseas visitors – bringing money not only to the trust but to wider local economies.
“We get people coming from all around the world,” Harvey continues. “The extra 2,000 people a week from Game of Thrones included a lot of foreign tourists. The other benefit is that these extra visitors spend money at our properties and locally. And while the shoots are taking place, you’ve got the crew and cast in hotels, food, services, building materials if required. It’s a massive injection of cash into the local economy.”
Lyme Park still attracts visitors thanks to its part in the BBC’s Jane Austen adaptation (Image: National Trust)
Appearing on screen also has a “long tail” for the properties featured. Even now, two decades on from a big-screen Pride and Prejudice adaptation starring Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Bennett, Trust locations like the Berkshire 18th-century Palladian mansion Basildon Park – which became Netherfield, Mr Bingley’s house, and a suitably grand residence for a “young man of four or five thousand a year” – are still reaping the benefits.
Filmmakers are limited to using locations only for the agreed projects. Neither must there be too much disruption. “We were once asked if a motorbike could be driven through a house and on to a balcony for an advert,” recalls Harvey. “We said no.”
When it came to making the recent instalment of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, Harvey explains that one Trust location had been turned into a holiday cottage in the near-decade since the first series was filmed. “But they only wanted one room for the second series so we were able to remove the furniture and it was fine,” he notes.
None of this is a new phenomenon. Cary Grant filmed The Grass Is Greener at Osterley Park, West London, in the 1950s; 1967 Carry On film Don’t Lose Your Head was shot at Cliveden, Bucks; and Harrison Ford starred in scenes for Indiana Jones And The Temple of Doom at Stowe House in Bucks in 1983. But Trust properties have cast such a spell over filmmakers that, since 2003, the charity has had a dedicated Filming and Locations Office which, on average, organises nine shoots a month.
From next weekend, the Express is teaming up with Europe’s largest conservation charity to give away free family passes. So take part and enjoy your own family movie magic in real life…
Colin Firth’s wild swimming still brings visitors, and revenue, to the National Trust (Image: BBC)
Lyme Park, Disley, Cheshire: Pride and Prejudice
Nestled on the edge of the Peak District, Lyme Park is the largest country house in Cheshire. Fans of BBC’s 1995 series Pride and Prejudice, however, remember it as Pemberley, home of Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy. He may have kept more clothes on than they do in the likes of Bridgerton and The Pursuit Of Love, but his appearance after a swim in the lake in episode four not only flustered Jennifer Ehle’s Elizabeth Bennet but was an iconic moment in British costume drama.
The shot of him swimming was achieved with clever editing and a tank back at the studio, because the actual lake is not deep enough to dive into safely. The interior of Pemberley was in fact Sudbury Hall, Rosings; Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s house is the Trust’s Belton House; Lacock village plays the town of Meryton and Lacock Abbey appears briefly as a Cambridge college.
Medieval kitchens in Lacock Abbey doubled for the corridors of Hogwarts and appeared in Pride & Prejudice (Image: Getty / iStockphoto)
Lacock Abbey and Lacock village, near Chippenham, Wiltshire: Harry Potter (2001-)
Apart from exterior shots at Alnwick Castle, 800-year-old Lacock Abbey was the main outside location for non-studio shots of Hogwarts School in the first two Harry Potter films. Lacock’s Chapter House provided the Mirror of Erised room, The Sacristy became Professor Snape’s potions class, and The Warming Room, with its genuine cauldron, was Professor Quirrell’s Defence Against the Dark Arts classroom.
The world of wizards returned for Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald when Trust staff had to deal with their own fantastic beasts, namely bats in the cloister complex, and protect them from being disturbed by filming. For the movie The Other Boleyn Girl, the Chapter House played the Palace of Whitehall where Katherine of Aragon meets the Boleyn sisters and the Palace bathhouse was recreated in the Warming Room.
Exteriors for Whitehall were shot at Knole; the Boleyn home was Great Chalfield Manor and Garden; Lacock Abbey’s exteriors also represented Wolf Hall, the Seymour family seat; while the Great Hall acted as the King’s Chambers in Calais. As Lacock village has barely changed in 300 years, it’s hugely popular with film crews who don’t have to worry much about removing satellite dishes, telegraph poles or traffic lights. But for 1840s Cranford, 34 houses had some sort of dressing and the Red Lion became the village shop, with a fake front so real customers could still access the pub unseen.
The house used as the Tomkinson sisters’ home in Cranford is also Harry Potter’s childhood home, attacked by Voldemort in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Cantax House, which was the exterior of Mrs Jamieson’s house in Cranford, is also where Harry Potter and Dumbledore find Professor Slughorn in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
For the 2009 Cranford Christmas special, the village was covered with fake snow in summer. For the Downton Abbey movie, Lacock village was transformed again, with Church Street turned into a livestock market before making way for a military parade.
Osterley House and Park features heavily in Bridgerton (Image: National Trust)
Osterley Park and House, Isleworth, London: Bridgerton (2023-), The Crown (2016-) and Persuasion (2007)
This Georgian country estate in West London famously appears in the second episode of the third series of Bridgerton as the location for the Full Moon Ball. “It’s a beautiful building,” says Tony Hood, Bridgerton’s location manager. “It worked very well for the ball sequence, which had to be spectacular.”
Tony explained that the art department particularly liked the striking courtyard at the front of the house, which is framed by grand columns. The full moon came courtesy of the lighting department. “We had to use a huge crane outside to create the moonlight for the ball,” he added. Osterley’s grand entrance hall also acted as a backdrop for several scenes, which is fitting as the room originally functioned as a venue for hosting balls, parties and dinners, as well as a space to welcome guests.
The hall’s design was inspired by ancient Greece and Rome and has a soft colour scheme of grey and white. The production team enhanced the hall’s grandeur with simple, white floral arrangements and created a soft glow with around 500 LED candles.
Also filmed at Osterley were An Alligator Named Daisy (1955), The Grass is Greener (1960), Mrs Brown (1997), The Queen (2006), Cranford (TV, 2007 & 2009), The Duchess (2008), Little Dorrit (TV, 2008), The Young Victoria (2009), Great Expectations (TV, 2011), Belle (2013), Doctor Thorne (TV, 2016), The Crown (TV, 2016-), Vanity Fair (TV, 2018), The Secret Garden (2020).
Luke Newton as Colin Bridgerton and Nicola Coughlan as Penelope Featherington at the Full Moon ball (Image: Liam Daniel / Netflix)
Knole, Sevenoaks, Kent: The Other Boleyn Girl (2008), Burke And Hare (2010), Mary and George (2023).
Built as an archbishop’s palace 600 years ago, Knole was once owned by King Henry VIII who hunted there, so it was apt for filming The Other Boleyn Girl.
Its maze of roofs at different heights, with chimneys of varying sizes and styles, made it ideal for a roofscape of Tudor London, a trick that was similarly used for a different era in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011). The exterior courtyard was used as the entrance to Whitehall Palace to match interiors shot at Lacock Abbey.
For Burke and Hare, starring Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis as the notorious grave robbers, director John Landis used the stable yard for a public execution scene.
It was transformed into a market square with lots of straw and mud, livestock, grubby peasants and a gallows. The front courtyard gate doubled as “prison gates in Scotland” and the crew shot a grave-robbing scene at West Wycombe Hill, with an archaeologist on stand-by in case they accidentally dug up anything historic. Knole’s entrance courtyard appeared in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) where it was snowed up to looklike a Swiss mountain castle. And in 1967, The Beatles shot two early pop videos at Knole, riding horses through a stone archway by the Bird House for Penny Lane and walking past a piano under a tree for Strawberry Fields.
Also filmed at Knole: The Favourite (2019), Vita and Virginia (2019), Mary and George (2023).
Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman in The Other Boleyn Girl (Image: Planet Photos)
Basildon Park, Lower Basildon, Pangbourne, Berkshire: Bridgerton (2023-) and Pride and Prejudice (2005)
After appearing in series two as the Featherington family’s garden, Basildon Park’s gardens returned again in series three as romantic scenery. This time, the Formal Garden provided a setting for Colin Bridgerton and Penelope Featherington’s first kiss. Harvey Edgington explains how experts made it look like a warm summer’s evening in October: “The production design team brought in around 5,000 artificial flowers to fill the rose garden with summer blooms, and added more greenery and foliage around the back of the house to create a dazzling backdrop for the action.”
For the first time, Basildon’s 18th-century interiors also appeared in Bridgerton as the home of Lady Tilley Arnold (Hannah New).
- Don’t miss your free National Trust family pass starting inside the Daily Express on Saturday (Ts&Cs apply)