What film and TV get wrong about London

Of course, London has been portrayed in different ways throughout cinema history, including its bombed-out ruins after World War Two, in films such as 1949’s Passport to Pimlico. The city’s edgier side has been evident in cult classics such as Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), featuring a brutalist housing estate in Woolwich, or 1987’s Withnail and I, shot in Notting Hill and Camden, home to the protagonists’ legendary squalid apartment. Performance, a 1970 gangster drama directed by Nicolas Roeg and starring Mick Jagger, was also set in a crime-ridden Notting Hill of the time. Most recently, the hit Apple TV+ series Slow Horses, starring Gary Oldman as the head of a group of MI5 misfits, has been filmed in urban East London.