London: The City That Can Play Anything

London has a slightly unfair advantage when it comes to the movies. Need romance? Head to Notting Hill. International espionage? Westminster. Magic? King's Cross. Zombies? Empty Westminster Bridge should do nicely. And if all else fails, point the camera at a red bus, throw Big Ben into the background and everybody immediately knows where they are.

Few films have sold the romantic version of London better than Notting Hill. Hugh Grant's William Thacker lives a quiet life selling travel books until Julia Roberts walks through the door and, several misunderstandings later, an entire corner of west London becomes a global tourist attraction. Portobello Road, the famous blue door and the streets surrounding the market remain inseparable from the film more than 25 years later. You can still visit both the location used for the movie bookshop façade and the real bookshop that inspired it.

Richard Curtis clearly wasn't finished with London, either. Love Actually scattered its stories all over the capital, from Heathrow Airport to Selfridges, Notting Hill and the Millennium Bridge. It gave us the London of Christmas cards: twinkling lights, grand houses, impossibly charming streets and Hugh Grant somehow ending up as Prime Minister.

Then there is Bridget.

Bridget Jones's Diary gave London a slightly messier heroine. Bridget's flat was placed above The Globe Tavern beside Borough Market, long before the area became quite the foodie destination it is today. It is also where Colin Firth and Hugh Grant conduct one of cinema's least accomplished fist fights. Bridget has continued moving through London ever since, with Mad About the Boy taking her to Hampstead while still finding an excuse to return to Borough Market.

But London isn't just very good at romantic comedies.

James Bond has been using the capital as his office for decades. In Skyfall, Bond meets the new Q among the paintings of the National Gallery before the film sends Daniel Craig across a beautifully photographed London of Whitehall, Westminster and MI6. Later Bond films including Spectre and No Time to Die returned to familiar territory around the Thames, Pall Mall and Whitehall. Nobody has done more to make going into the office look unnecessarily dramatic.

And then Danny Boyle did something almost impossible.

He made London empty.

The opening of 28 Days Later remains one of the great images of the capital on film. Cillian Murphy's Jim walks through a deserted London, eventually crossing Westminster Bridge with Parliament looming behind him and virtually nobody else in sight. The sequence was filmed early in the morning with brief road closures, transforming one of the busiest parts of one of the world's busiest cities into something genuinely eerie.

London has played every version of itself imaginable. An American Werewolf in London made the Underground terrifying. Paddington turned the city into a warm, colourful storybook. Guy Ritchie has spent much of his career finding gangsters down its side streets. Mary Poppins floated above its rooftops. Sherlock Holmes prowled its Victorian streets. Tom Cruise has repeatedly run through it at considerable speed.

And perhaps that's London's greatest cinematic trick. Paris gives you romance. Vegas gives you excess. London gives you everything.

One minute Hugh Grant is standing outside a blue door declaring his love. The next, Cillian Murphy is wondering where everybody has gone.