Where was ‘Great Expectations’ filmed?

It’s barely a decade since we had the last two versions of Charles Dickens’ action-packed saga of love and ambition, but then it’s a tale that bears repeating. While 2011’s BBC version gave us Gillian Anderson and Ray Winstone, and 2012’s film brought Ralph Fiennes and Helena Bonham Carter, this time we have the currently unmatchable Olivia Colman and the very particular atmosphere of writer Steven Knight.

Colman, bringing to Miss Havisham some of the eccentricity she displayed in The Favourite, makes herself quite at home in the murky, brutal world of Knight, creator of Peaky Blinders and co-writer of Tom Hardy vehicle Taboo. His version takes liberties with Dickens’ story but they’re all to the good: while innocent striver Pip (Fionn Whitehead) is relatively unchanged, Knight turns the lawyer Jaggers into a larger-than-life amoral gangster figure, wonderfully played by Ashley Thomas. With sex and drugs added, this is Dickens with bells on, leaning heavily on the Victorian Gothic, both visually and tonally.

It is, though, still set in Dickens’ time, which means the locations are doing a lot of work. “There are limited places where you can go to film a period show,” explains supervising location manager David Kennaway, whose CV takes in work as varied as This England, Blue Story and I Hate Suzie. “It’s not like there are endless Georgian buildings available. And, as a location manager, the creative element is very important to me – I like to find places that other people haven’t filmed.”

The solution was to choose specific prestige locations in London and then roam the countryside of the south-east (without, funnily enough, using the novel’s setting of Kent) and a little further afield. Here’s David Kennaway’s guide to the places we’ll see behind the fog and frockcoats of Great Expectations.

Oxfordshire

As in any adaptation of Great Expectations, one of the most striking locations is the home of Miss Havisham, left to fall into ruin after she is jilted at the altar. For this, the production created a composite of three parts, starting with the exterior and gated courtyard of the grand house Myles Place on West Walk, close to Salisbury Cathedral. For the interiors, some were built in studios but other parts were filmed at Shirburn Castle, near Watlington in Oxfordshire. This moated castle dates back to the 14th century and was home to the Earls of Macclesfield, the first of which remodelled it in Georgian style. It's since been used for films including Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and Philomena, as well as TV staples Inspector Morse, Midsomer Murders and Poirot. As Kennaway points out, the room we see with a tree growing through the wall is from the studio portion: “We didn’t think it would be a good idea to stick a tree in a several-million-pound house,” he says.

Shirburn Castle also provided several exteriors, including the backyard at Miss Havisham’s house where Pip fights Herbert Pocket, and also parts of the village where Pip lives with Joe Gargery and his sister, using outhouses that were dressed as cottages.

Surrey

Much of Pip’s village was recreated at Oxenford Farm, near Elstead in Surrey. This is a working farm, producing Christmas trees as well as beef cattle, but it has an impressive screen CV that includes the films Wolfman and Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood, due to the presence of a series of buildings designed in the Gothic revival style by the famed Augustus Pugin in the 1840s. Here, the buildings became the inn and the schoolhouse, and the farm also provided Joe’s blacksmith shop.

Hampshire

Just across the county line from Oxenford Farm is the village of Hartley Mauditt, close to Alton. This provides the church, where we see a Christmas service, and the graveyard where Magwitch appears in episode one. St Leonard’s was founded in Norman times but extensively rebuilt in the mid-19th century, by which time the surrounding village had largely disappeared after the local sire, Lord Stowell, abandoned his manor house and left the inhabitants without work.

Also in Hampshire but south towards the coast is Bucklers Hard, where scenes with convict ships were filmed. Sitting at the edge of the New Forest on the River Beaulieu, and part of the Beaulieu Estate which includes the British National Motor Museum, Bucklers Hard was an 18th-century shipbuilding centre that has been preserved as a working museum. As well as a fully rigged schooner, the area was dressed with ponies and carts and thatched buildings.

Essex

Much of the doomladen atmosphere of episode one comes from scenes set in the fog on the marshes of Kent. For this, the production filmed in two places: the first was Peper Harrow, close to Oxenford Farm in Surrey, and the second was the wetlands of Essex, recently seen in the series The Essex Serpent. “We shot in a place called Fingringhoe, on an out-of-use shooting range down near Mersea,” explains Kennaway. “It was good because it was untouched, but filming in those places is called a triple-SI – Site of Special Scientific Interest. You have to get ecological risk assessments to show that you’re not going to damage the flora and fauna, so it’s quite a business. And also it was very muddy – and tidal.”

Shrewsbury

For the streets of London, in episodes two and three, much of the filming took place in Shrewsbury. “It’s just much easier to film and control Georgian streets there than it is in Bloomsbury,” says Kennaway. This took place around the areas of St John’s Hill, St Mary’s Water Lane and Council House Court, using a well-preserved area that was recorded by the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, and was also used for the 1980s adaptation of A Christmas Carol. Added to this were shots filmed at Luton Hoo Estate in Bedfordshire: “There’s a whole network of streets there,” explains Kennaway, “so it’s used for lots of productions including Taboo, which was made by the same production company as Great Expectations.”

London

London was also extensively used as a location in the series. While the scene that opens the series was shot at Marlow Bridge in Buckinghamshire, much of the filming of water was shot around Millennium Mills, a former factory in Docklands. This is where we see Pip in a rowboat, with green screens used to change the backdrop.

For the Old Bailey and Jagger’s office, the production took over Skinners’ Hall on Dowgate Hill, in EC4. Built in 1670, this is home to The Skinners’ Company, one of the traditional Livery companies of London. Newgate Prison, meanwhile, was filmed in the catacombs of the House of Detention in Clerkenwell, the remains of a 19th-century prison that was demolished to make way for a school and is now flats.

For the Royal Exchange, where Pip goes to work under the guidance of Jaggers, filming took place at the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office in the heart of Westminster. We see Pip walking past the bright white Georgian buildings of King Charles Street to the door, while inside the trading floor is the extraordinary Durbar Court in the India Office. Designed by Matthew Digby Watt, this marble-paved courtyard surrounded by columns of Aberdeen granite was used for formal receptions as well as the coronation celebrations of King Edward VII. Filming here, says Kennaway, was more straightforward than you might imagine from the grandeur of the surroundings: “It does take a while to negotiate,” he says, “and it depends on the political content of the material – I tried to get in there once for Dennis Potter and the meeting was a car crash. This, of course, is classic English literature and that does help – as does Olivia Colman.”

Great Expectations begins on BBC One and BBC iPlayer on Sunday 26th March at 9pm.