Set-jetting – flying off to see where a favourite movie was filmed – has long been a small but important tourism niche.
But while feature films such as Wonka and Napoleon are boosting visitor numbers in Bath and Blenheim, the growth of TV streaming is also fuelling a rise in screen tourism that is expected to transform the pastime into big business next year.
The Crown, All Creatures Great and Small, Ted Lasso and Slow Horses have all had fans visiting the starring locations, while there is anticipation about where Warner Bros will choose to shoot a new TV adaptation of the Harry Potter novels.
And Masters of the Air, a follow-up to Band of Brothers by Steven Spielberg’s production company, is likely to have people flocking to east Anglia and other parts of the home counties when it airs in January.
Visit Britain has teamed up with the British Film Commission to launch Starring Great Britain in the new year, and will be working with studios and production companies to promote films, TV series and their locations.
Adrian Wootton, the chief executive of the British Film Commission, said: “Rather than simply attracting people to seek a ‘chocolate box Britain’ experience, it’s the very widest range of genres that’s attracting people to visit our locations.”
While House of the Dragon, Outlander and the Bond films are strong draws, the shows which “don’t necessarily depict locations in a ‘positive’ way – take Broadchurch, Peaky Blinders, Slow Horses – are driving people to visit where they were shot,” he added.
Around half of general international visitors remain in London during the stay, and most of the rest follow a tourist trail to Cambridge, then Oxford, Stratford-upon-Avon, York and Edinburgh. Screen tourism can help persuade visitors than there is more to Britain than London, Oxbridge and Shakespeare.
VisitBritain said that 34% of international visitors say they want to visit locations from their favourite film and TV shows. Patricia Yates, VisitBritain’s chief executive, said: “By shining the spotlight on film- and TV-inspired experiences you can only have in Britain, we’re encouraging visitors to come and discover more of our amazing destinations, putting themselves in the picture.”
Seren Welch, a screen tourism consultant who has been working with UKinbound, the trade association for UK tourism, said the UK benefited from the sheer volume of production.
“Places like the Royal Naval College in London – it easily boasts over 150 feature films by now. The slow burn of a TV series is very effective, though. Call The Midwife now has a permanent tour at Chatham historic dockyards.
“Quite often, the streamers are keen to tell the narrative behind the locations as well, especially Netflix. There was a spike in bookings within 48 hours of Emily in Paris being released. People are watching and scrolling and booking.”
Set-jetting has a surprisingly long pedigree. Thomas Coryate, the 17th-century English writer who walked to India, asked the Mughal emperor Jahangir for safe passage to Samarkand to visit the tomb of Timur. Coryate’s request was almost certainly inspired by Christopher Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine the Great, which dominated Elizabethan London’s emerging theatre scene.
Nowadays, screen tourism is rather quicker. “We had a girl recently – she came from China, specifically to see Grassington,” said Linda Furniss, owner of the Stripey Badger bookshop in the north Yorkshire village. “She was on her own as well – she flew in, she stayed one night and flew back. That is the extreme extent of the popularity of All Creatures Great and Small.”
Grassington has always been “a magnet for visitors”, said Furniss, who is one of the local business owners who works with Channel 5 and the show’s producers. They transformed the village’s shopfronts into 1930s period style to create an authentic setting for the veterinary drama. But it was when the show began to air in the US that things really took off.
“The impact of visitors is just colossal,” Furniss said. “I have a map of America in my bookshop now so we can talk knowledgeably about where people are from. The village has got used to it, now that we know how the filming works. The crew are all so friendly – it’s a messy experience but enjoyable at the same time.”
The impact can be enduring. Local Hero was critically acclaimed on its release in 1983, but the movie was only a minor hit at the box office. Even so, 40 years later there is still a stream of visitors to Pennan, a seaside village near Aberdeen, to see the phone box where the main character used to call his bosses in Houston.
Bill Pitt and his wife, Lynn, from Charleston in South Carolina, were among those visitors in 2005. “We stayed in Crovie [four miles away] but really we were coming to see the phone box,” Pitt said. He joked to her during the holiday that they should retire to north-east Scotland. Now the Pitts live in Pennan, running a self-catering cottage business, and Bill is responsible, along with his friend Eddie Hayes, for painting the phone box to protect it from sea spray.
“I contacted BT and said, ‘We’ve got a dynamite phone box here, people come here to see it – would you mind if I painted it?’
“They said, ‘Sure – we’ll even send you the paint’.
“It’s such a special place. And when the weather’s nice, people stop and they look, and they get their picture taken. All because of the movie.”
