Windsor Gardens is really Chalcot Crescent
The best-known screen address in the neighbourhood does not exist. In Paddington (2014) and Paddington 2 (2017) the Brown family live at 32 Windsor Gardens, a street invented by Michael Bond. What the camera actually shows is 30 Chalcot Crescent in Primrose Hill: a curving run of pastel stucco a few minutes below the summit of the hill.
The sequel stayed in the same block. Phoenix Buchanan, the faded actor played by Hugh Grant, was given 1 Chalcot Square as his house, with a couple of windows blocked out for filming and an extra top floor removed digitally. Chalcot Square is also where Sylvia Plath lived; her English Heritage blue plaque is at No. 3, a few doors from the film set.
Paddington 2 ranged more widely across NW1 than the first film. Paddington's round on the dustcart with the postman was shot on Hartland Road in Chalk Farm, with the tower of Holy Trinity Church behind and the railway bridge and painted terraces doing most of the work, and the chase after the thief runs along the Grand Union Canal towpath at Camden Lock before continuing west into Little Venice.
A van in a Camden driveway
The Lady in the Van (2015) is the rare case of a film shot in the exact place it describes. Margaret Fairchild, who called herself Miss Mary Shepherd, lived in a succession of dilapidated vans on Alan Bennett's driveway at 23 Gloucester Crescent from 1974 until her death in 1989. Bennett published the account as an essay in the London Review of Books in 1989, in book form in 1990, and as a stage play directed by Nicholas Hytner at the Queen's Theatre in 1999, with Maggie Smith as Miss Shepherd.
When Hytner filmed it, with Smith again in the lead and Alex Jennings as Bennett, principal photography began in October 2014 at the house itself. The film reached UK cinemas on 13 November 2015. For a few weeks the crescent — Italianate, 1840s, largely Grade II listed, designed by Henry Bassett — had a van back on the same patch of gravel.
Wolves, snakes and the Regent's Park menagerie
London Zoo, on the Regent's Park side of NW1, is one of the capital's longest-serving film locations, with credits stretching back through The Fallen Idol, Arabesque and Turtle Diary. Two of its appearances have outlived the enclosures that hosted them.
In An American Werewolf in London (1981), David Kessler wakes naked and amnesiac the morning after his transformation in the Wolf House at the zoo. In Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, it is the zoo's Reptile House where Harry discovers he can talk to snakes and releases one into a Surrey afternoon; the 1927 building used for the scene was replaced in 2024 by a new reptile and amphibian exhibit, though the connection is still marked on site.
Regent's Park also supplies the last scene of Withnail & I (1987), in which Withnail delivers Hamlet's "What a piece of work is a man" to a line of indifferent wolves through a chain-link fence, near the park's Gloucester Gate entrance at the end of Parkway. Earlier in the sequence the two walk the Broad Walk with the Ready Money Drinking Fountain behind them. It is worth noting that the flat the pair supposedly share in Camden Town was filmed at Chepstow Place in Notting Hill — a reminder that screen geography and postcodes rarely agree.
A Baker Street that isn't Baker Street
The BBC's Sherlock put 221B in NW1, but not at the address the stories give it. The exterior is 187 North Gower Street, roughly a mile east of the real Baker Street, chosen because Baker Street itself is heavy with traffic and Holmes-themed signage. The production replaced the building's front door with a similar black one numbered 221b and left the rest of the street alone; Speedy's Sandwich Bar and Café, on the ground floor, appears in shot whenever Holmes and Watson come out of the flat.
Why location managers keep coming back
The reasons are practical as much as picturesque. NW1 offers long uninterrupted runs of nineteenth-century stucco and brick with very little modern intrusion; curving crescents that read as complete streets from a single camera position; the canal and Camden Lock within a few hundred metres of quiet residential terraces; and, in the Primrose Hill streets, a road layout that has been closed to through motor traffic since the late 1960s. The hill itself supplies a skyline that is legally required to stay legible: its summit is one of London's protected viewing locations, with the sightlines to St Paul's Cathedral and the Palace of Westminster safeguarded in planning policy and the trees kept deliberately low.