Focus Features

From the Champs Élysée where Jean Seberg touted the Herald Tribune in A Bout de Souffle, to the San Francisco sequoia forest where Kim Novak foretold her death in Vertigo… there’s always been a certain romance to visiting the real-life spots where great movies were shot. This year’s London Film Festival organised a special serial celebration of this very enthusiasm, under the banner ‘Films On Foot,’ designed to appeal both to cinephiles and keen walkers. With a foot in both camps, so to speak, Kaleem Aftab went forth to report for FilmInFocus.

Any guest to my house in South Kensington gets treated to the tale of how a certain scene in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) was shot on ‘my’ street. Admittedly the most common reaction from said guests is, “I don’t remember that bit…” Still – I insist – there is something impressive in the fact of one’s address having a connection, however tenuous, to a famous and much-loved motion picture. Wherever we happen to live in life, it’s possible that over time we’ll come to find the old place, the old neighbourhood, a tiny bit drab. There are times when what one’s habitat could really use is for a film crew to descend and sprinkle a little magic movie dust round the general area.

For the full gallery of
images for A Walk on the
Mild Side? click here

Of course London is one of the great cities of cinema, from Hitchcock and Ealing comedy to James Bond and Harry Potter; and Londoners take a big interest in the city’s film heritage and the pub trivia game of which movies were shot where. Seeking to take advantage of this, the Ramblers Association (the UK’s leading walkers’ information service) have this year teamed up with the London Film Festival to arrange a series of guided walks through districts of the city, each walk promising to point out locations in the capital that have been seen in a movie theatre near you. As someone who walks and also watches movies, I felt this was something I had to see, and as a seasoned journalist who seeks the toughest assignments rather than the cushy numbers, I chose to undertake one of the longest walks of the series (checking in at 7.5 miles) – and on a Saturday morning, no less.

Okay, and now the truth: I actually didn’t realise, going in, that the walk would be so long, having chosen it for the simple reason that the route ran through my own neighbourhood. Moreover it was my hope that, if nothing else, this walk was bound to provide me with fresh stores of trivia with which to wow my houseguests, about all the other great movie locations sitting a stone’s throw from my doorstep. To be honest, we had all got a bit bored with Four Weddings… Of course, given that my Festival walk was scheduled to start in Notting Hill, I ought to have guessed that I was about to learn many more things about the oeuvre of Richard Curtis. But I was sure there had to be plenty other candidates for consideration: indeed, so regularly are the streets of Notting Hill used for film locations that only last year residents’ groups complained when Sienna Miller and Cillian Murphy stopped traffic for the shooting of the upcoming Hippie Hippie Shake.

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From the Champs Élysée where Jean Seberg touted the Herald Tribune in A Bout de Souffle, to the San Francisco sequoia forest where Kim Novak foretold her death in Vertigo… there’s always been a certain romance to visiting the real-life spots where great movies were shot. This year’s London Film Festival organised a special serial celebration of this very enthusiasm, under the banner ‘Films On Foot,’ designed to appeal both to cinephiles and keen walkers. With a foot in both camps, so to speak, Kaleem Aftab went forth to report for FilmInFocus.

Any guest to my house in South Kensington gets treated to the tale of how a certain scene in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) was shot on ‘my’ street. Admittedly the most common reaction from said guests is, “I don’t remember that bit…” Still – I insist – there is something impressive in the fact of one’s address having a connection, however tenuous, to a famous and much-loved motion picture. Wherever we happen to live in life, it’s possible that over time we’ll come to find the old place, the old neighbourhood, a tiny bit drab. There are times when what one’s habitat could really use is for a film crew to descend and sprinkle a little magic movie dust round the general area.

For the full gallery of
images for A Walk on the
Mild Side? click here

Of course London is one of the great cities of cinema, from Hitchcock and Ealing comedy to James Bond and Harry Potter; and Londoners take a big interest in the city’s film heritage and the pub trivia game of which movies were shot where. Seeking to take advantage of this, the Ramblers Association (the UK’s leading walkers’ information service) have this year teamed up with the London Film Festival to arrange a series of guided walks through districts of the city, each walk promising to point out locations in the capital that have been seen in a movie theatre near you. As someone who walks and also watches movies, I felt this was something I had to see, and as a seasoned journalist who seeks the toughest assignments rather than the cushy numbers, I chose to undertake one of the longest walks of the series (checking in at 7.5 miles) – and on a Saturday morning, no less.

Okay, and now the truth: I actually didn’t realise, going in, that the walk would be so long, having chosen it for the simple reason that the route ran through my own neighbourhood. Moreover it was my hope that, if nothing else, this walk was bound to provide me with fresh stores of trivia with which to wow my houseguests, about all the other great movie locations sitting a stone’s throw from my doorstep. To be honest, we had all got a bit bored with Four Weddings… Of course, given that my Festival walk was scheduled to start in Notting Hill, I ought to have guessed that I was about to learn many more things about the oeuvre of Richard Curtis. But I was sure there had to be plenty other candidates for consideration: indeed, so regularly are the streets of Notting Hill used for film locations that only last year residents’ groups complained when Sienna Miller and Cillian Murphy stopped traffic for the shooting of the upcoming Hippie Hippie Shake.

The Ramblers congregate at the Ladbroke
Grove tube station

Come Saturday lunchtime our group convened at Ladbroke Grove underground station. My first note on the day’s proceedings was that the turnout was pretty good. (No doubt, in the great tradition of public marches through London, the Metropolitan Police would have estimated the numbers at a modest 40 persons, while the organisers would have boasted 55, the truth lying somewhere in-between.) As we mingled in readiness for the off, I was dying to tell anyone who would listen that Ladbroke Grove station was itself a location used to great effect in a short film – Much Ado About A Minor Ting – that I produced for Channel 4 and the Film Council in 2007. But – and this may surprise my close friends – I decided finally not to blow my own trumpet.

Our leader for the afternoon was Eleanor Harris, organiser of the Films on Foot Festival and publicity officer for London’s 20s-30s walking group The Metropolitan Walkers. First up, like sheep we were herded to a front door facing out onto the Westbourne Park Road. Eleanor informed us that this was the blue door featured so prominently in Notting Hill (1999). Except the door was now black. “The current owners repainted it”, said Eleanor, “to stop people like us gawking.” Most of us in the party already knew that the house behind the door formerly belonged to Richard Curtis, and that he sold it soon after the success of Notting Hill at what newspapers reported was a significant profit. I suspect that when the current owners decide to move on, that door will turn blue again.

From there we wandered a block or so down the Portobello Road, which has been used in numerous films and now plays host to an excellent independent film festival. But I was slightly disillusioned to hear only Notting Hill mentioned (again) as having been shot there. What about Julian Temple’s neglected Absolute Beginners (1986), which reaches its climax at the Notting Hill Carnival? Or a mention of the Duke of Wellington Pub, as featured in Michael Winner’s early film West 11 (1963)? As such, I almost blew a gasket when we turned right so as to drop by the travel bookshop where Hugh Grant met Julia Roberts for the first time…

Already I wanted to scream: ‘Look! If we turn left we’ll arrive at number 25 Powis Square, where a certain Mr Turner lived in Performance (1970). Okay, it was number 81 in the movie, but still… Remember Performance? Mick Jagger, James Fox? Donald Cammell, Nicolas Roeg?’ Roeg is a long-time Notting Hill resident and has always loved using his neighbourhood in his films. I was further amazed that this walk seeming intent on skipping a whole area of Notting Hill that, movie-wise, can boast the Tavistock Hotel pub from which Withnail and I (Richard E Grant and Paul McGann) are chased by an Irish yob in Bruce Robinson’s 1987 cult masterpiece; the slum that defaced the St Luke’s Road in Bryan Forbes’ The L-Shaped Room (1962); and streets that had not insignificant roles to play in Blow-Up (1966) and A Hard Day’s Night (1964).

The legendary Video City

Instead, we took in a few more locations from Notting Hill. We even walked past Video City – a legendary rental store that is London’s answer to Kim’s Video in New York – without acknowledgement of its crucial importance to hardcore film lovers back in the age of the VHS videocassette. Still – on the plus side, it was a sunny day, the walk was bracingly long, I’d seen some parts of the area that I’d missed over the years, and I got to chat to lots of new people. Most of them were genuine ramblers looking for a pleasant Saturday walk, but a fair proportion had come to the event because of its link with the Film Festival.

It was as we sauntered through Kensington Gardens that the anorak in me began at last to get some satisfaction. The stop at the famous Albert Memorial kicked off with mention of 2004’s Wimbledon (you cannot be serious…) before we finally hit on a film made before 1994: Douglas Hickox’s Brannigan (1975), in which John Wayne is the eponymous lawman sent to London to track down an American mobster. Then Michael Winner got his name-check at last in respect of his 1967 effort The Jokers, following by the turn of The Ipcress File (1965). I did have a slight chuckle when a fellow walker said that some director called Hitchcock had shot round here too. But in general it felt like we were burrowing a bit deeper into film history. So I didn’t even mind so much when we moved on to the Serpentine Gallery for a lengthy discourse on Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004), followed by a mention (probably the first anyone has made in years) of the misbegotten 1989 movie version of The Rachel Papers, Martin Amis’s formerly admired debut novel.

I was happier still when we adjourned to the Serpentine’s café for a rest that was well-earned, since we’d been walking at a pace rather quicker than the ‘leisurely’ that was advertised. I chatted a bit to Eleanor, who informed me that the walk had been put together at relatively short notice, and that she’d already undertaken all of the walks on offer during the Festival herself, even though she would only be leading a couple of them. Furthermore she had spent much of the last fortnight watching films for research, and I was amazed that she hadn’t taken the journalist’s short-cut of phoning up the relevant borough’s film location office and getting a list emailed to her.

The best moment of the whole walk came soon after we re-started on our way, and reached The Grand Entrance by Hyde Park Corner, next to Aspley House, a location I’ve gone past probably thousands of times in my life. Only now did I discover that this was where the very first moving pictures were committed to celluloid, in 1889, by the Bristol-born inventor William Friese-Green. If nothing else I had now gleaned a cinematic factoid with which to bore visitors and dinner guests for the foreseeable future. We had still to hear about the minis that were marshalled on Park Lane for The Italian Job (1969), and about the first underground car park to be used as a location fly-by… But I was already contented. I didn’t even mind that our last stop was the spot where the wedding reception took place in Notting Hill. My knowledge and appreciation of cinema had already been suitably enhanced; and, really, that’s what film festivals – and film walks – should be all about.

Click here for the full gallery of images.