This is England … and Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland: where to find the UK’s greatest film scenes

Scotland

Beats (2019)
Livingston, 1994, and just as the Criminal Justice act is about to end the illegal rave era, two young friends set off to have a mad one. Brian Welsh’s rhapsody to rave reminds us of that important part of British youth culture we left somewhere in a field in West Lothian. Ellen E Jones

My Childhood (1972)
Based on director Bill Douglas’s own wartime childhood, this was made in the Scottish mining village of Newcraighall, where PoWs were confined. One shot shows Newcraighall Colliery, known as Klondyke, which closed in the 1960s. Peter Bradshaw

Ratcatcher (1999)
The great Lynne Ramsay made her first feature with a Scottish reverie, set in the Glasgow of 1973 (and, briefly, on the moon). The result is filled with brilliant, mournful poetry, a boy’s life captured amid creaking tenements and the Forth and Clyde Canal. Danny Leigh

Trainspotting (1996)
The film’s “choose life” scene in which Mark Renton, played by Ewan McGregor, shoplifts and sprints away down the pavement, takes place on Princes Street in Edinburgh. PB

Under the Skin (2013)
To watch Jonathan Glazer’s modern classic is to see Glasgow through new eyes. The gaze belongs to a predatory alien played by Scarlett Johansson; we come to share her experience of Trongate, Celtic Park and the unnerving hum of the Buchanan Galleries shopping centre. DL

* * *

Wales

Blue Scar (1949)
Documentarist Jill Craigie made this fiction feature about a young woman who moves away from her hometown mining community to London. It is shot partly on locations in Aber/Blaengwynfi in south-west Wales: a (now demolished) colliery, Commercial Street and the Pithead Baths. PB

The Proud Valley (1940)
The principled Paul Robeson was selective about his movie roles, but lent his Hollywood glamour and beautiful baritone to the south Wales coalminers’ cause in this Ealing Studios drama. The miners reciprocated, pledging support and hosting tribute concerts, even during Robeson’s McCarthy-era blacklisting. EEJ

Sleep Furiously (2008)
The seasons pass over the rural Welsh community of Trefeurig, but what defines this place all year? Such is the question asked by Gideon Koppel’s deadpan portrait of his childhood home: a world of silent farmland and flashes of sly absurdity. DL

Submarine (2010)
Oliver is a precocious 15-year-old in Swansea whose lopsided view of love leads to melodramatic moments, with the placid Welsh coastline as a backdrop. Submarine is also the feature-directing debut of Richard Ayoade, AKA “that bloke off the panel shows”. EEJ

Twin Town (1997)
This raucous comedy crime drama stars Rhys Ifans and his brother Llŷr, and it’s unsentimentally set in Port Talbot and Swansea. With sweeping shots of the seaside, we also see Constitution Hill and Langland Bay beach huts. PB

* * *

Northern Ireland

Boys from County Hell (2020)
A crew of construction workers unearth the ancient legend of Abhartach – a blood-sucking revenant and inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula – in this comedy-horror caper set in County Tyrone. Particularly good craic is had by reluctant local hero Francie (Nigel O’Neill). EEJ

Elephant (1989)
The brutal logic of the Troubles is laid bare by fabled director Alan Clarke. All but wordless, this 39-minute film moves through the parks, factories and sidestreets of Belfast, every scene ending with one anonymous figure gunning down another. DL

Good Vibrations (2012)
This affectionate comedy about 1970s punk entrepreneur Terri Hooley is set in Belfast, with city locations including Rugby Road near the Botanical Gardens, and the Lanyon Building of Queen’s University. PB

Hush-a-Bye Baby (1990)
Margo Harkin’s sparkling, Derry-set teenage romance (co-starring Sinéad O’Connor) was twice ahead of its time. The backdrop of the 1983 Irish abortion referendum prefaced the 2018 Repeal the Eighth campaign. Also, Harkin’s quartet of school pals were very much the original Derry Girls. DL

Maeve (1981)
You can’t go home again, so the story goes. In 1981’s angular and underseen Maeve, that home is Belfast. Returning from London, the titular heroine steps back into a fractured city, all while consumed by childhood memories. DL

Odd Man Out (1947)
Director Carol Reed made Vienna the setting for one noir masterpiece in The Third Man. With Odd Man Out, he did the same with Belfast, with James Mason playing a wounded republican fugitive on the run. DL

* * *

England: north-west

24 Hour Party People (2002)
Set in Manchester – or Madchester, to be more specific – this proudly postmodern biopic of Factory Records founder Tony Wilson is a night out at the Haçienda in filmic form, and also a high point in the fruitful Steve Coogan-Michael Winterbottom collaboration. EEJ

Bhaji on the Beach (1993)
A day out at Blackpool’s famous seaside is the occasion for much introspection, confrontation and home-cooked snacks in Gurinder Chadha’s debut. Singalongs to the Punjabi-language cover of Cliff Richard’s Summer Holiday should be included in the British citizenship test. EEJ

Control (2007)
Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis’s story is told in this tough, yet visually beautiful film from Anton Corbijn, with many superbly realised northern locations, including Ian’s actual house in Barton Street in Macclesfield. PB

A Taste of Honey (1961)
Every line a quote-in-waiting, the film of Shelagh Delaney’s stage play hinges on teenage renegade Jo – and the backdrop of Salford. But let’s not forget the supporting role played by the tawdry joys of Blackpool’s Central Pier. DL

Withnail and I (1987)
Much of the most rain-soaked film in British cinema is set in Camden Town. But it would be half the glorious comedy it is without an even wetter Lake District, to which the titular out-of-work actors go on holiday by accident. DL

* * *

North-east

Billy Elliot (2000)
Billy Elliot contains some wonderful location work in Durham, which is lovingly evoked: the street with the sea view down which Billy dances is Embleton Street in Dawdon, and the street where Julie Walters’s teacher character drops Billy off after his lesson is just by the old Easington Colliery. PB

Get Carter (1971)
Like the struggling actors of Withnail and I, Michael Caine’s gangster Jack Carter travels north from London. For him, though, the destination is Newcastle upon Tyne, on the trail of revenge and a beer in a thin glass. DL

I, Daniel Blake (2016)
Set in Newcastle upon Tyne, Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or winner is Loachian cinema at its most effective. Dave Johns and Hayley Squires give startlingly humane performances that stand out all the more being set against the inhumanity of the benefits system. EEJ

Lady Macbeth (2016)
Out in the wilds of 19th-century Northumberland, an unhappily married woman may stray from the path of moral righteousness. Florence Pugh shows us just how far, in her breakthrough role as the titular antiheroine. EEJ

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991)
The 90s Robin Hood, featuring Alan Rickman as the scene-stealing sheriff, was filmed around England and France but very prominently at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland – notably when the Bishop of Hereford falls from a window of the tower after trying to take a lot of gold with him. PB

* * *

Yorkshire

Ali & Ava (2021)
Romance can blossom in the most apparently unromantic of settings. That’s the upshot of Clio Barnard’s intensely heartfelt fourth feature, a beautifully performed, music-fuelled drama set in Bradford, starring Adeel Akhtar and Claire Rushbrook as the unlikely couple. EEJ

Billy Liar (1963)
We meet the young fantasist Billy Fisher (Tom Courtenay) in an anonymous Yorkshire town, mostly played on screen by Bradford. But the real setting for this dark comedy of imagined self-improvement is the inside of Billy’s head – the stage for his endless daydream heroism. DL

God’s Own Country (2017)
Britain’s answer to Brokeback Mountain is a sensuous Yorkshire romance starring Josh O’Connor as a young sheep farmer from near Keighley, whose outlook on life and land is transformed by a burgeoning new relationship with a Romanian migrant worker (Alec Secăreanu). EEJ

Kes (1969)
Ken Loach’s searing and funny film is set south of Barnsley, in the small town of Hoyland in South Yorkshire. Many of its streets have been demolished, but the hillside of Grange View is where Billy reads his Dandy comic and he trains the kestrel itself on Hoyland Common. PB

Threads (1984)
In which the world ends with a ground-level view of Armageddon, as experienced by Sheffield and its South Yorkshire surrounds. The film remains a late cold war landmark, a nuclear endgame broadcast on BBC One. DL

* * *

East Midlands

The Lair of the White Worm (1988)
Hugh Grant and Amanda Donohoe star in Ken Russell’s horror film based on the Bram Stoker novel, and in its opening shot the film features the beautiful but faintly eerie natural limestone cavern called Thor’s Cave in the Derbyshire Peak District, which is here the purported home of the dreaded “Worm”. PB

The Last Tree (2019)
There’s a soul-stirring visual comparison between the Wash in Lincolnshire and a Lagos beach here, as writer-director Shola Amoo rejects the usual cliches of young Black British male representation in favour of something transcendent and Terrence Malick-esque. EEJ

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)
Two stars were born for the price of one in the seething Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and both in Nottingham’s Raleigh bicycle factory. The first was Arthur Seaton, the magnetic rebel at the heart of the story – the second Albert Finney, the young actor playing him. DL

Skeletons (2010)
Nick Whitfield’s Kaufmanesque comedy, about two psychic exorcists roaming around removing people’s painful memories with special equipment, is set in the Midlands – in the village of Bonsall in the Derbyshire Dales. One character lives in a boat beside the looming towers of Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station. PB

This Is England (2006)
The title’s bold claim is fully justified by Shane Meadows’s film set in an unidentified Midlands town in 1983 about a skinhead youth gang infiltrated by far-right ideology. Seen through the eyes of troubled 12-year-old Shaun, played by Thomas Turgoose, it’s also about much more. EEJ

* * *

West Midlands

Atonement (2007)
Joe Wright’s movie, based on Ian McEwan’s novel, is notable for its mysterious and intense scenes at the family home of the Tallis sisters; this is in fact the magnificent Victorian mansion Stokesay Court in south Shropshire, with its prospect over the Clee Hills. PB

The Card (1952)
The Card is the story of a cheeky young man on the make, who hails from the Potteries. The film uses the town of Burslem on the Fowlea Valley a great deal. In the opening shot, taken from the rooftop of its Dale Hall Pottery, the location is shown in a panorama. PB

Felicia’s Journey (1999)
This brooding drama starring Bob Hoskins is set in Birmingham, with vivid location work near the city’s Digbeth bus station, the Rotunda and the old Bull Ring Shopping Centre, Electric Avenue by the River Tame and the Windsor Street gas works. PB

Handsworth Songs (1986)
The 1985 riots that shook Handsworth, Birmingham are a starting point for artist-film-maker John Akomfrah. But Handsworth Songs has a wider lens, too: a dense, dubby bricolage of Windrush, English racism and colonial history. DL

Locke (2013)
Technically, the location of Locke is the BMW driven for the entire running time by Tom Hardy’s regretful construction foreman. But his journey down the M1 starts in Birmingham, and the story is rooted there, too, on familiar ground for writer-director Steven Knight. DL

* * *

East of England

Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (2013)
Is Norfolk proud of Partridge yet? The bard of modern media mediocrity hasn’t done much for broadcasting, but he did prove himself an action hero in this rarest of treats: a sitcom-to-cinema adaptation that actually manages to stay funny. EEJ

Chariots of Fire (1981)
This patriotic hit cheated with many of its locations – the “Great Court Run” was actually filmed at Eton, not Trinity College, Cambridge – but the film uses the actual King’s Parade in Cambridge, whose hustle-bustle of students and local people is not so different now. PB

Fish Tank (2009)
Andrea Arnold’s 2010 best British film Bafta winner is set in that suburban hinterland where London becomes Essex, and a girl becomes a woman. First-time actor Katie Jarvis leads, while then rising star Michael Fassbender demonstrated unsettling charisma in a key supporting role. EEJ

The Go-Between (1971)
The rich beauty of Norfolk and East Anglia is used to great effect in Joseph Losey’s classic. Brandham Hall, the fictional family home where the young hero spends his summer holidays, is the Elizabethan country house Melton Constable Hall, with its handsome park. PB

His House (2020)
The best British horror movie in years never spells out where its urban haunting takes place. But a grey Tilbury was the filming location, and you could somehow sense the flavour of the nearby docks in a tale of desperate refugees and pasts that catch up with us. DL

* * *

South-east

After Love (2020)
The white cliffs of Dover take on a new significance in Aleem Khan’s intimately cinematic debut about widow Mary Hussain, played by Joanna Scanlan, who discovers her late husband’s secret life, then takes daring steps to infiltrate it. EEJ

Brighton Rock (2010)
If all seaside towns have an underbelly, Graham Greene’s tale of teenage crime and punishment could only have been set in Brighton: in pubs thronged with day-tripping Londoners, with a sun-kissed beach made out of stones. DL

A Field in England (2013)
Ben Wheatley takes us all back to our folk horror roots with this English civil war psychedelia set in Surrey. Shot Bbeguilingly in black and white, it is unlike anything you’ve seen and uncannily familiar at the same time. EEJ

Last Resort (2000)
A Russian immigrant (Dina Korzun) with a romantic soul is trapped in Margate, with no means of making money. Arcade manager Alfie (Paddy Considine) might be her salvation, but film-maker Paweł Pawlikowski is too honest to resort to easy sentiment. EEJ

* * *

South-west

Bait (2019)
North Cornwall is shown with icy clarity in Mark Jenkin’s experimental, lo-fi, handheld feature, its surfaces described as having the glittering sheen of Cornish granite. Shooting took place at Gooninnis House in St Agnes and on the West Penwith peninsula. PB

Java Head (1934)
Los Angeles-born Anna May Wong was considered Hollywood’s first Chinese-American star (a reputation recently burnished by Damien Chazelle’s Babylon), but she also made several British films, including this romantic tragedy set in 1800s Bristol, in which she radiates a mesmerising glamour. EEJ

Nuts in May (1976)
Ah, the great British camping holiday! Idyllic, isn’t it? That is until someone else pitches their tent too close. Mike Leigh taught us that in this comedy classic set in Dorset, but the likes of Keith and Candice-Marie, played by Roger Sloman and Alison Steadman, will never learn. EEJ

The Shout (1978)
This disturbing psychological chiller, about a man who claims to practise a lethal “terror shout”, is set in and around the beautiful north Devon coast, with scenes at Hartland Abbey and also shots of Saunton Sands near the River Taw estuary and the sand dunes of Braunton Burrows. PB

* * *

London

Babylon (1980)
No discussion of London movies could take place without a mention of Babylon, Franco Rosso’s vivid portrait of sound system culture and Black London life. From a production office above a Deptford church, the movie cast a pinpoint eye across a south London that cinema had previously little noticed. DL

My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)
Thatcher-era south London is the setting for this still-fresh film about a young British-Pakistani man, played by Gordon Warnecke, running a laundrette with Daniel Day-Lewis as his white punk boyfriend. It’s a representation landmark, but wears that status as lightly as soapsuds. EEJ

The Long Good Friday (1980)
Did any film map a new era as precisely as The Long Good Friday? In 1980, with London’s Docklands set to become an investors’ playground, Bob Hoskins’ gangster declared himself a businessman and a Londoner. And in London, business would never be the same. DL

Notting Hill (1999)
Richard Curtis’s revered romcom offers a glimpse behind the doors of the smart, vaguely bohemian, terraces of Notting Hill, west London. Hugh Grant is the lonely, lovable owner of a travel bookshop situated somewhere between Notting Hill Gate and Portobello market. It is through this market that our hero wanders in a lovelorn way, having fallen hopelessly for Julia Roberts’s Hollywood megastar. PB

Victim (1961)
The seedy, racy nastiness that lay beneath the surface of London’s West End in the early 60s, with its hypocrisy and evasion, is brilliantly captured in this drama of blackmail and homophobia. Dirk Bogarde plays the barrister with a troubled past, while sinister lowlife figures drift around the pubs and drinking dens of Cecil Court and Charing Cross Road. PB