The King's Speech on Location in Portland Place, London © David Barrie
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As a fitting follow-up to last week’s 10 Can’t-Miss London Locations for the Traveling Movie Buff, we look at how to tour London with The King’s Speech in mind. It is of course the movie that’s been on everyone’s lips, especially after it scooped up four Oscars including “the big one” for Best Picture.
The movie faced a real challenge — it wanted to be historically accurate but wasn’t allowed to film in any of the royal palaces (there’s a longstanding rule against drama productions using the palaces).
So Buckingham Palace was recreated by using a number of locations, the main one being Lancaster House (just off the Mall) – owned by the Foreign Office – where all the scenes of the State rooms were filmed.
Westminster Abbey was also out of the question for the coronation scene — so again a stand-in had to be used and it was Ely Cathedral (anyone who knows their architecture can tell the difference — Ely is East Anglian Romanesque, while Westminster is very French-influenced Gothic).
But it’s the evocation of a depressed 1930s Britain, rather than the grand ”˜state’ scenes that make this film genuinely different. London was filmed in the grey, low light of winter, using the real Harley Street where the speech therapist’s studio had been located (though for the interior, a rather larger space was used, the original apartment being too small). Grit was added — literally; and smog was created for atmosphere (as well as for hiding modern accretions like traffic signs and yellow lines).
Wembley, alas, has changed dramatically, so Elland Road Stadium in Leeds and the Odsal stadium in Bradford were used as stand-ins. But other locations used in The King’s Speech are very much for real:
- Battersea Power Station used as the BBC Control Room
- 33 Portland Place was used for the Duke and Duchess’s house (though in reality that was located at 145 Piccadilly)
- And you can also see Pullens Estate (Southwark) one of relatively few Victorian tenement buildings still standing in London
So there you are — you should easily be able to track down those locations. But whether they look like they do in the film is another matter!
What hotel should a movie buff stay in when visiting London? You’re completely spoilt for choice, as this article about London hotels in the movies illustrates.