Where was bbc pursuit of love filmed?
14 May 2021, 18:34
The popular three-part series starring Lily James was filmed in various locations.
New period drama The Pursuit of Love has already proven a hit with fans, owing to its glamorous costume design and contrastingly modern soundtrack.
Starring Lily James as Linda Radlett and Emily Beecham as Fanny Logan, the three-parter is based on the bestselling novel of the same name, by Nancy Mitford.
The Pursuit of Love is told from Fanny’s perspective, as she details her close bond with cousin and best friend, Linda; a whimsical young girl who is obsessed with the idea of love.
Fanny watches as her cousin falls in and out of romances, watching in awe - and also doubting her own life choices, which are much more grounded and “sensible”.
Part of what makes the TV show so beautiful is its stunning filming locations. As Linda escapes the confines of her childhood home (a grand estate in the countryside) and explores the world, we leap from rolling green hills to decadent Parisian hotel suites.
Read more: Every piece of classical music in The Pursuit of Love soundtrack
For the most part, The Bottle Yard Studios in Bristol were used to shoot key scenes.
Among the sets built at the studios were Cheyney Walk House, Linda’s Chelsea flat, the Beverly Hills Hotel and The Ritz.
The stately home of Alconleigh is actually an amalgamation of several different estates in the English countryside. Both Dyrham Park in Bath and Rousham House in Oxfordshire (above) were used.
Played by Andrew Scott, Merlin is arguably the best character in The Pursuit of Love. Fabulously camp and one of Linda’s biggest cheerleaders, Merlin’s eccentric home and personality really add to the show.
The exterior shots were filmed at both Gloucestershire’s Badminton House, and the Dyrham Park gardens.
Owing to Covid-19 restrictions, the university scenes were actually shot at Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire.
Those who have watched the series will know that a sizable chunk of it takes place in Paris, France.
The crew did actually travel to the City of Light to film some shots.
Here are the places you'll see on screen, and the filming locations that were used.
In short: most filming took place on location in the Bristol and Bath area, and on set at the nearby Bottle Yard Studios. Some scenes were also shot in Paris. The Pursuit of Love was filmed across three months in the summer of 2020.
One of the key locations in The Pursuit of Love is the Radletts' country estate at Alconleigh. Here, sadistic patriarch Matthew Radlett (Dominic West) rules over his family with an iron fist; the household includes his wife Sadie (Dolly Wells), daughter Linda (Lily James) and an assorted collection of children. Each Christmas, Fanny Logan (Emily Beecham) comes to stay with Uncle Matthew and Aunt Sadie – and it is through her eyes that we are first introduced to Alconleigh.
But the Alconleigh we see on screen is a bit of a hodgepodge, created for television using a variety of different country houses and specially-built sets.
Firstly, there's Dyrham Park. This is a National Trust property, with a magnificent 17th century Baroque mansion set in ancient parkland. If it looks familiar, that might be because it has previously appeared in Remains of the Day, Sense and Sensibility (2008) and ITV’s Sanditon. A period drama superstar!
The Great Hall at Dyrham was transformed into a ballroom for two "coming out" balls: the one held in honour of Linda's older sister Louisa, and the one for Fanny and Linda. In the first of those scenes, Andrew Scott makes his debut as Lord Merlin for a dream-like sequence involving silk pyjamas and contemporary dancers. In the second scene, dashing young student Tony Kroesig (Freddie Fox) turns up and sweeps Linda off her feet.
The Pursuit of Love's production team also made the most of Dyrham Park by using it as a stand in for London's Hyde Park (in the scene where Fanny and Davey take a walk together), and re-imagining the house's "Plod Room" as a bookshop for episode two.
Anyway, back to Alconleigh! Because another property – Rousham House in Oxfordshire – was also used extensively to create that Alconleigh look.
Rousham House was built in 1635, and has been owned by the same family ever since. It has famous gardens, which are open to the public, but the house itself has rarely been seen on TV, so this is a real treat.
In addition, some interior sets were created at the Bottle Yard Studios in Bristol. Those include the Alconleigh bathroom, where the two cousins bathe and gossip – and the laundry cupboard where the children all gather to share family news.
Wealthy and eccentric Lord Merlin (Andrew Scott) is an unusual neighbour to the Radletts, and he has his own estate called "Merlinford".
The exteriors were created with the help of Badminton House in Gloucestershire, which has previously been seen (but from a different angle) in Bridgerton. The Dyrham Park gardens (see above) were used as a stand-in for Merlinford's grounds, and many of the interiors were shot in the studio – not that you'd guess it, from the specially-built sets.
As a side note, Badminton House was also a small element of the patchwork used to create Alconleigh. You'll see it when Matthew punishes Linda in episode one, and its grounds can be seen during hunting scenes and a swimming pool scene.
In addition to the above, other locations used to film the drama include Dinton Park, Phillips House and Stourhead House.
The National Trust says, "With support from Bath Film Office, the production team created a stunning period railway station inside Green Park Station, Bath’s former railway station." This stood in for the Gare du Nord, in Paris.
Bitton, which is part of the Avon Valley Railway in South Gloucestershire, stood in for London Victoria.
In the first episode, Linda and Fanny slip away to Christ Church College at the University of Oxford, planning to attend a party hosted by Tony Kroesig. Filming was originally meant to take place at Christ Church itself, but because of Covid this proved impossible.
Instead, the production team made use of Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire – as previously seen in Harry Potter, Wolf Hall and Pride and Prejudice.
The opening sequence features Cheyne Walk House, Linda Radlett's London home - which, seconds later, is destroyed by a bomb. This scene was actually shot entirely on set at Bottle Yard Studios, and the London skyline was created with the help of CGI.
At another point in the story, Linda lives in London at Bryanston Square in Marylebone. The exteriors were shot in Bath, outside No 1 Royal Crescent Museum.
Speaking of Bath, the city's famous Assembly Rooms also feature in The Pursuit of Love. You can see this location in shots of the foyer of the Ritz Paris, and the tea room of the Ritz London.
The Beverley Hills Hotel and the Ritz were also created with the help of studio sets.
In episode two, Fanny moves into an idyllic little house in Oxfordshire, with her husband Alfred – who is an academic at the University of Oxford. This was filmed with the help of the "Gardener's Cottage" at Ston Easton Park.
Part of the third episode is set in Paris, and this proved to be one of the hardest things to arrange in the time of Covid. Ultimately, all the Paris scenes had to be filmed in just two days.
Executive producer, Charles Collier told CN Traveller about filming at the Place Dauphine on the Ile de la Cité in the Seine: "It’s three street scenes and a café, shot around the square and the side streets coming off it.
Though the most enamoring piece of The Pursuit of Love is the plot, the dreamy scenery surely enhances the viewing experience. From sprawling British estates to winding Parisian streets, the new Amazon Prime series transports viewers into the European interwar period, leading up through World War II's end. Actress Emily Mortimer, who wrote and directed the new series (and also appears in a supporting role), hunted across England for the locations to match the vision in her head, bringing to life the world of lead characters Linda Radlett (Lily James) and Fanny Logan (Emily Beecham). The series is based on Nancy Mitford’s 1945 novel by the same name, and not only was it difficult to bring the written word to the screen, but also having do so while following pandemic protocols only added greater challenges.
However, despite the difficulties, Mortimer constructed the universe of Fanny and Linda with existing manors, restaurants, and neighborhoods paired with meticulously constructed sets. Here, Mortimer takes us through the filming locations for The Pursuit of Love in both England and France.
After an extensive search, Mortimer decided that Rousham House had to be the set for Alconleigh, the Radlett ancestral estate. In the series, Linda and her siblings are trapped at Alconleigh with their overbearing father Matthew (Dominic West). Fanny comes to visit for holidays and the group roams the estate, which can be both fantastical and prison-like. Mortimer needed a location to encapsulate the home's duality.
"I knew I wanted somewhere really special that had the feeling of being a castle that [the girls] were locked up in, almost like Rapunzel's castle," Mortimer told T&C. "I also wanted it to have a magic [to it] so that by the end of the show, when finally Linda comes back to that childhood home, it feels much like all of our childhood homes, where it was somewhere that you're longing to escape from and then when you come home older in your life, you feel nostalgic about it and there's a melancholy to the experience because it has so many memories."
Located in Oxfordshire, Rousham House was built in 1635 by Sir Robert Dormer and is still owned by the Dormer descendants. The house was remodeled by famed British architect William Kent in the 18th century. Mortimer used the interior and exterior of the house in filming. Some of the interior shots had to be filmed a studio, but Mortimer mimicked the inside of Rousham for those sets. For example, though the bathtub scenes were filmed on a set, Mortimer shared that the wallpaper was a replica of the Rousham's actual bathroom wallpaper. In filming at the house itself, the connectivity of the estate's layout was extremely important to Mortimer.
"It was so important for people to move through the rooms. I wanted to have a journey from the front door, coming up the steps, through the hallway into the dining room. And then for Linda to run out of the dining room and go up the stairs and along the corridor and into the cupboard," Mortimer said. "I really wanted to feel like you, the audience, knew the nooks and crannies and the spaces of that Radlett house."
For the eccentric Lord Merlin's house, Mortimer opted for Badminton House, a famous, large country home in Badminton, England. The house is the principal seat for the Duke of Beaufort, a British aristocrat, but is often used for filming. Viewers might recognize the home from Bridgerton. Not only did Mortimer shoot a variety of scenes at Badminton, she also stayed at the estate during filming.
"I stayed in this beautiful old hunting lodge that [designer] Robert Kime had decorated in the 1980s, but it was built in like 1704 and the Duke used to keep his mistress in there—lucky mistress," Mortimer said. "So, I used to imagine that I was the Duke's mistress just waiting for my lover to come down the drive every night when I went to bed."
They used the house for not only the facade of Merlin's estate, but they also filmed the Spanish refugee camp on the property. The ballroom inside served as Merlin's ballroom, where the character keeps horses—"they already had had a horse in there, so they were open to the idea," noted Mortimer of the filming logistics. The interior also stood in for the Ritz hotel room in Paris, where Linda stays for a period of time.
The Pursuit of Love team only had one day to film in Paris, due to both scheduling conflicts and COVID precautions. Therefore, many of the Paris scenes were filmed in England (like the Ritz scenes in Badminton). However, the city streets, squares, and Seine were all the real deal. Mortimer noted that the group filmed on Paris's Pont Neuf bridge and in the square just behind it. The scene where Linda climbs out of a window into an alleyway was also filmed in Paris.
Mortimer said of the time crunch, "[The Paris scenes were] at the very end of the shoot and we had no time or money left, but like all things, sometimes these constraints are good—they force you to be imaginative and you find solutions that in the end were just as good if not better than if you'd had all the time and all the money in the world."
As for the Paris substitutions, The Pursuit of Love filmed the restaurant that was supposed to be the French Brasserie Lipp at the Savile Club, a members club in London. The team also created a French nightclub in a wine cellar at Stourhead, another British estate.
In the series, which aired on the BBC in 2021, their friendship is put to the test as Fanny settles for a quiet life, and Linda decides to follow her heart, whatever the cost. Most of the filming took place in the South West of England, including several of the historic houses we look after.
Though the most enamoring piece of The Pursuit of Love is the plot, the dreamy scenery surely enhances the viewing experience. From sprawling British estates to winding Parisian streets, the new Amazon Prime series transports viewers into the European interwar period, leading up through World War II's end. Actress Emily Mortimer, who wrote and directed the new series (and also appears in a supporting role), hunted across England for the locations to match the vision in her head, bringing to life the world of lead characters Linda Radlett (Lily James) and Fanny Logan (Emily Beecham). The series is based on Nancy Mitford’s 1945 novel by the same name, and not only was it difficult to bring the written word to the screen, but also having do so while following pandemic protocols only added greater challenges.
However, despite the difficulties, Mortimer constructed the universe of Fanny and Linda with existing manors, restaurants, and neighborhoods paired with meticulously constructed sets. Here, Mortimer takes us through the filming locations for The Pursuit of Love in both England and France.
After an extensive search, Mortimer decided that Rousham House had to be the set for Alconleigh, the Radlett ancestral estate. In the series, Linda and her siblings are trapped at Alconleigh with their overbearing father Matthew (Dominic West). Fanny comes to visit for holidays and the group roams the estate, which can be both fantastical and prison-like. Mortimer needed a location to encapsulate the home's duality.
"I knew I wanted somewhere really special that had the feeling of being a castle that [the girls] were locked up in, almost like Rapunzel's castle," Mortimer told T&C. "I also wanted it to have a magic [to it] so that by the end of the show, when finally Linda comes back to that childhood home, it feels much like all of our childhood homes, where it was somewhere that you're longing to escape from and then when you come home older in your life, you feel nostalgic about it and there's a melancholy to the experience because it has so many memories."
Located in Oxfordshire, Rousham House was built in 1635 by Sir Robert Dormer and is still owned by the Dormer descendants. The house was remodeled by famed British architect William Kent in the 18th century. Mortimer used the interior and exterior of the house in filming. Some of the interior shots had to be filmed a studio, but Mortimer mimicked the inside of Rousham for those sets. For example, though the bathtub scenes were filmed on a set, Mortimer shared that the wallpaper was a replica of the Rousham's actual bathroom wallpaper. In filming at the house itself, the connectivity of the estate's layout was extremely important to Mortimer.
"It was so important for people to move through the rooms. I wanted to have a journey from the front door, coming up the steps, through the hallway into the dining room. And then for Linda to run out of the dining room and go up the stairs and along the corridor and into the cupboard," Mortimer said. "I really wanted to feel like you, the audience, knew the nooks and crannies and the spaces of that Radlett house."
For the eccentric Lord Merlin's house, Mortimer opted for Badminton House, a famous, large country home in Badminton, England. The house is the principal seat for the Duke of Beaufort, a British aristocrat, but is often used for filming. Viewers might recognize the home from Bridgerton. Not only did Mortimer shoot a variety of scenes at Badminton, she also stayed at the estate during filming.
"I stayed in this beautiful old hunting lodge that [designer] Robert Kime had decorated in the 1980s, but it was built in like 1704 and the Duke used to keep his mistress in there—lucky mistress," Mortimer said. "So, I used to imagine that I was the Duke's mistress just waiting for my lover to come down the drive every night when I went to bed."
They used the house for not only the facade of Merlin's estate, but they also filmed the Spanish refugee camp on the property. The ballroom inside served as Merlin's ballroom, where the character keeps horses—"they already had had a horse in there, so they were open to the idea," noted Mortimer of the filming logistics. The interior also stood in for the Ritz hotel room in Paris, where Linda stays for a period of time.
The Pursuit of Love team only had one day to film in Paris, due to both scheduling conflicts and COVID precautions. Therefore, many of the Paris scenes were filmed in England (like the Ritz scenes in Badminton). However, the city streets, squares, and Seine were all the real deal. Mortimer noted that the group filmed on Paris's Pont Neuf bridge and in the square just behind it. The scene where Linda climbs out of a window into an alleyway was also filmed in Paris.
Mortimer said of the time crunch, "[The Paris scenes were] at the very end of the shoot and we had no time or money left, but like all things, sometimes these constraints are good—they force you to be imaginative and you find solutions that in the end were just as good if not better than if you'd had all the time and all the money in the world."
As for the Paris substitutions, The Pursuit of Love filmed the restaurant that was supposed to be the French Brasserie Lipp at the Savile Club, a members club in London. The team also created a French nightclub in a wine cellar at Stourhead, another British estate.
