Screening Britain: Where to visit film and TV sets of your favourite shows

Forget tea with the King. Most visitors to Great Britain say they’re more interested in visiting Harry Potter, Bridget Jones or Bridgerton’s gossip sheet writer, Lady Whistledown.

According to VisitBritain, 90 per cent of potential U.K. visitors said they want to explore places where their favourite movie and TV scenes were set or filmed.

“Globally, we are all devoted to a particular show,” says Lewis Swan, a longtime James Bond fan who started Brit Movie Tours in 2009. He credits social media with the new travel trend of “set-jetting.”

A 007 devotee who used to hunt down London Bond movie locations in his spare time, Swan understands the draw. He figured others might want similar experiences and launched his business when he was laid off from his publishing job.

His company runs about 60 guided tours across the U.K. Groups travel on foot, by bus and even taxi. Private tours are also available.

“There’s much more stuff out there in terms of screen tourism than there ever has been,” Swan says.

“Films, TV and tourism have a lot in common,” says Cathy Stapells, director of Canada’s office for the U.K. national tourism agency VisitBritain. “They bring people together and they can transport us to new places, experiences and adventures.”

The national tourism agency is promoting screen-based tourism with global marketing campaign Starring Great Britain.

Why not discover a destination through a different lens? With themed tours based on popular shows and movies, visitors wander down back streets and through residential neighbourhoods, stopping in graveyards, pubs and hidden places.

In London, lovers of Ted Lasso, Dr. Who and Mary Poppins can follow in the footsteps of their favourite characters. Those who sigh with contentment at the sight of the peaceful villages and green fields on All Creatures Great and Small will love the Yorkshire Dales. Most tours include stopping for a pint in the TV-famous pub and a visit to the World of James Herriot. The attraction is dedicated to the author of the beloved books about his veterinary practice.

Swan follows trends to add new tours. As soon as the fourth Bridget Jones movie, Mad About the Boy, started streaming on Prime Video in February, he scouted walking tour locations in the affluent North London neighbourhood of Hampstead used in the new film.

His most popular tours involve Harry Potter and Downton Abbey.

With a third and final Downton Abbey movie hitting theatres in September, Highclere Castle in Hampshire should expect more visitors. The ancestral home of the Carnarvon family has played lavish Downton Abbey onscreen from the start. Castle tours include the fascinating history of former resident, the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun with Howard Carter in 1922.

Boy wizard Harry Potter still spreads screen magic for fans. At London’s King’s Cross station, excited kids pose for photos in striped Hogwarts scarves while pushing a prop luggage trolley into the wall at Platform 9¾.

Take the train from London Euston station to nearby Watford Junction to visit the immersive behind-the-scenes wizardry at Warner Bros. Studio Tour: The Making of Harry Potter. Walk through actual movie sets, including Hogwarts’s Great Hall, Dumbledore’s rooms and along twisting Diagon Alley. The original Hogwarts Express train seems to arrive at the platform in a cloud of steam.

Historic Oxford, less than an hour from London by train, has plenty for Potter fans. The Tudor Great Dining Hall in Christ Church College is a ringer for Hogwarts’s spectacular dining hall. The grand staircase leading to it was used in several of the movies. Scenes were also filmed in the Divinity School’s Bodleian Library, with its magnificently carved vaulted ceiling.

Head north to Northumberland to find Alnwick Castle, which stood in as the backdrop for Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Fans of the gossipy Regency-era Netflix romance Bridgerton can get to Bath by train from London in under two hours to see where some of the show’s scenes are set.

Nearly two thousand years after the Romans indulged in the healing pleasures of the hot mineral springs here, the well-heeled and well-known of the 18th century made Bath a fashionable place to live the good life.

They built hundreds of Georgian-era, neoclassical Palladian buildings from honey-coloured Bath Stone, many of which are ideal backdrops for Bridgerton storytelling.

In Birmingham, tourist-spending in the West Midlands jumped by several million pounds when the period crime drama Peaky Blinders started streaming on Netflix in 2013 and visitors wanted to see where the series was set and filmed.

Interest will probably pop again when the film version of the series, The Immortal Man, starring Oscar-winner Cillian Murphy, comes out later this year. It was shot in Birmingham, including at the new Digbeth Loc Studios built by series writer/creator Steven Night.

Key scenes in the series were also filmed in Liverpool and at Black Country Living Museum in Dudley, a short drive from Birmingham. There are more than 50 replicas, relocated or restored shops, houses and industries here, dating from the late-19th century to the 1930s.

When you go

Air Canada will serve London Heathrow from six Canadian cities (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Halifax, Ottawa and Calgary), with up to 63 weekly flights in summer 2025. Air Canada also flies direct from Toronto to Manchester, as well as from Toronto and Montreal to Edinburgh, with up to 15 weekly flights.

Go here for more on visiting filming locations in Britain.

Advertising feature produced by Globe Content Studio with Air Canada. The Globe’s editorial department was not involved.