The Square Mile is its own local authority with its own film team, and the streets empty out in the evening.
What City of London looks like
The City is 1.12 square miles. About 8,600 people live in it and around 614,500 work in it. Most of them leave in the evening.
Nearly eighty per cent of it burned in 1666. Wren and John Evelyn both drew grid plans for the rebuilding and neither was used, so the City went back up on the same medieval street lines. Those lines are why the lanes are narrow and bent while most of the buildings on them are Victorian or later.
is at the west end, running up from the river to . It is wide, paved and closed to traffic. The steeple of St Nicholas Cole Abbey stands at the end of one of the streets off it. is below, a lower level of roadway under the offices, with nobody on it at night.
is in the middle of the City, off Gresham Street. St Lawrence Jewry is on one side and the Guildhall porch faces it. A curved line of dark stones in the paving marks the outer wall of the Roman amphitheatre underneath.
is on the eastern side, four lanes wide, with towers standing behind the older buildings along it. sits between it and Lime Street. , at the north end of the City, ends at the Barbican.
Filming is arranged through the City Corporation rather than through a borough. On weekdays between 7am and 7pm it allows no cranes, no catering vehicles and no winnebagos. A road closure needs twelve weeks of notice.
Films shot in City of London
The City Corporation publishes a film walk of its own. Bank junction was emptied for Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, and the empty shop in Bull's Head Passage at became the Leaky Cauldron in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
Lawrence of Arabia, 1962
The memorial service that opens the film was shot on the steps in front of the cathedral. The interior was rebuilt in a studio in Spain. David Lean had worked at St Paul's before, in 1946, for the scene where Pip arrives in London in Great Expectations.
RKO 281, 1999
The Great Hall was dressed for a banquet in RKO 281, the film about the making of Citizen Kane. The porch in this photograph was redecorated as the lobby of a Paris hotel for the second Bean film with Rowan Atkinson. Guildhall and the yard in front of it belong to the City Corporation, which handles filming at both.
What City of London can double for
City of London can stand in for a financial district and a city with nobody in it.
