VisitBritain believes we care more about TV locations than national parks – it might be right

Telegraph

17-02-2025

VisitBritain's latest global tourism campaign, Starring Great Britain, hopes to cash in on this country's increasing popularity as a backdrop for big-screen and internationally-streamed television shows. A four-minute launch film, directed by Academy Award-winning British director Tom Hooper, takes its cue from the blockbuster style, showing Tom Cruise climbing onto the roof of a posh train in Scotland and a holidaying couple interacting with Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts. The press blurb promises international visitors 'a cinematic journey through Britain, giving them a front row seat to the destinations at the heart of the on-screen action'.
Backed by an £8 million advertising campaign in the UK's most lucrative inbound visitor markets – including Australia, the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) countries, France, Germany and the USA – it looks like a safe bet. Who hasn't bumped into flat-capped Peaky Blinders fans seeking out period warehouses? Birmingham 's visitor numbers increased by 26 per cent between 2013, when the first Peaky Blinders season aired on the BBC, and 2018. Almost as ubiquitous were the Poldark addicts trying to look dashingly windswept on Cornish clifftops – though the boom subsided as soon as the series folded.
Films like Notting Hill and Braveheart and television series like Saltburn and Game of Thrones are widely reported to have put specific locations on the tourist map. Blue Badge guides working in cities have to offer location-scouting tours for UK as well as foreign guests.
It makes psychological sense that people want to visit film locations. Just as folk in Chaucer's age longed to go on pilgrimages, so our secular world, which reveres A-list celebrity actors and even makes time for Z-list reality show participants, will naturally be drawn to sites where characters turned into superheroes, kissed, or went shopping.
VisitBritain's list of promoted films includes Mission: Impossible and Paddington, pointing, respectively, to St Paul's and Portobello Road. Spider-Man: Far From Home, which uses Tower Bridge to good effect, also makes the cut. These blockbuster films have millions of fans, certainly, but it could be argued that these locations are hardly in need of a helping hand.
'We collaborated with the studios and the national tourism boards to ensure we represented all of Britain,' says Patricia Yates, the chief executive of VisitBritain. 'Our research shows that films and TV shows are powerful motivators for travel. With more than nine out of 10 potential visitors to the UK keen to visit places used in filming and seen on-screen, our new campaign is harnessing the huge draw of screen tourism to encourage people to explore more than just the honeypots.'
In the interests of avoiding overtourism, it is to be hoped the film pilgrims follow the script.
The organisation's consumer-facing website also highlights Bridgerton. Castle Howard in North Yorkshire reported that the number of visitors aged 18-24 to its website increased by more than 3,400 per cent after the series' release.
Succession, and, of course, Harry Potter are being promoted – and, if they get people to go to West Wycombe and Eastnor Castle, that's all to the good. Did you know Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason used Headcorn Aerodrome in Ashford, Kent, or that Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom was filmed in Cragside, Northumberland? Were you aware that F9 (part of the Fast & Furious franchise) filmed scenes in the Scottish Lowlands, and that the Game of Thrones spin-off House of the Dragon was shot at quarries and beaches in Anglesey? Would a few seconds of celluloid fame make you visit such places?
Film and television have a global reach and class-crossing appeal that other artistic forms can't match. Apart from Shakespeare, Wordsworth, the Brontës and Jane Austen, it's hard to think of British writers of the past who have the cultural kudos to draw in substantial visitor numbers. Books work through the imagination; readers dream up settings to a large extent. Films are more passive, and people can get quite excited about standing in the exact spot where a favourite scene unfolded.
On-screen entertainment appears to deliver very quickly, generating intense social media activity and directing people to explore how they can take their response to the next level. Research from Netflix, published in December 2023 in collaboration with Skyscanner, showed global flight searches to filming locations were up by 53 per cent whenever a new season of The Crown was streamed. The research also showed that the hashtag #TheCrown drove in excess of six billion views on TikTok, and half of the Gen Z (18- to 24-year-olds) respondents surveyed were inspired to learn more about 20th-century British history after watching the show.
Some academic research suggests that a direct cause-and-effect analysis is oversimplified and that the impact of a hit film on tourism is 'fractional' and 'diffuse'. It is also maintained that the market is fickle, and the effect of film varies greatly between destinations 'and that this is related to background causes independent of screen effects'. People might absolutely love a James Bond or Top Gun film, but they're not going to hop on a plane to Libya or Iran. More broadly, a lot of modern travel is about minimum effort for maximum Instagrammability – cheap show-off value, if you like. How many members of the mass market will make the effort of catching the (probably delayed) train to Scotland or Wales if they can get a perfectly shareable five-second video on Tower Bridge?
Films use multiple locations, sometimes in a single scene, and will often fake it, using Liverpool's Victorian warehouses, for instance, to recreate 1940s Manhattan – as happened in Captain America: The First Avenger. The city's filming promotions department even has a dedicated page to tempt directors not willing to foot the higher bills stateside. But are ordinary tourists from New York, for example, going to fly to Liverpool to see a simulacrum of New York?
Real film buffs, though, are a different breed – they are extremely knowledgeable, more generous with their leisure time and deeply curious. A trick has perhaps been missed. The internet is awash with fan sites detailing the precise details of shoots from decades of British film-making. The VisitBritain campaign could have been an opportunity to educate visitors, from the UK and overseas, and show them the depth of the country's cinematic heritage, while sending people to really off-beat destinations.
I first went to see the old US Embassy on Grosvenor Square because I'd seen it in The Omen. I even took the Tube to All Saints' Church, Fulham, to see where Father Brennan was impaled on a lightning conductor. Monty Python's The Meaning of Life used back streets in Colne, Lancashire, to shoot the hilarious 'Every Sperm is Sacred' musical sketch. An American Werewolf in London employed the murk and mizzle-swathed moors of Powys in Wales to evoke the scarily grim British countryside – and the Black Swan pub in Ockham was The Slaughtered Lamb, where Brian Glover poured pints for a clientele of suspicious yokels. Get Carter, with its grim, murderous plot, made powerful use of amazing locations across Gateshead and the North East.
With a tiny few exceptions – mainly in Scotland – the UK cannot compete with the likes of Monument Valley or Central Park in New York. But if you splice together the eccentric and the local, you get a truly fascinating film map of the country. I would much rather walk along a deserted beach thinking about Michael Caine and Britt Ekland than queue to enter a stately home or join a line climbing Snowdonia.
The appeal of film is obvious. It's emotional, shared, memorable and glamorous. Tom Hooper's campaign promo film shows punters trying to put themselves in the frame of famous films using their smartphones. We are only a few small AI steps away from app-based VR and AR which will be able to show us the films in situ, with the real backdrop behind, and then show us alongside our favourite actors.
But film steals thunder, and it replaces the need to go to places. Maybe next year's campaign could be Smartphone-free Britain – starring the actual cityscapes and landscapes rather than glammed-up versions featuring grinning Hollywood stars or gurning tourists.