The Most Beautiful Film Locations in the United Kingdom
29 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful film locations in the United Kingdom are Stonehenge, White Cliffs of Dover and Natural History Museum. The list covers 29 film locations. Last updated 14 October 2026.
British cinema works with a dense historic landscape: prehistoric monuments, Roman frontiers, medieval cathedrals, Tudor palaces and Victorian Gothic all within a few hours of London's studios. Period dramas need real stone and carved wood, and fantasy films need buildings that look as if they could hold magic, and Britain has both in abundance. Its coast and chalk add some of the most recognisable natural scenery in Europe.
The Harry Potter films are a tour in themselves. The fan-vaulted cloisters of Gloucester Cathedral became the corridors of Hogwarts, the Gothic front of St Pancras stood in for King's Cross, and the Geometric Staircase in St Paul's Cathedral became a Hogwarts stairway. Lincoln Cathedral played Westminster Abbey in The Da Vinci Code, and Paddington the bear ends his first film in the great hall of the Natural History Museum. Hampton Court Palace, Henry VIII's Tudor palace on the Thames, has served many costume dramas.
Older and wilder places complete the list. Stonehenge, raised in the Neolithic on Salisbury Plain, has been painted, filmed and argued over for centuries. Hadrian's Wall runs across northern England, and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves stopped beside its Sycamore Gap. The White Cliffs of Dover and the limestone arch of Durdle Door on the Jurassic Coast are images of Britain itself. Canterbury Cathedral, scene of the murder of Thomas Becket, and the glass spike of The Shard frame a thousand years of building.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Stonehenge | Stone circle | ✓ |
| 2 | White Cliffs of Dover | Cliff | |
| 3 | Natural History Museum | Science museum | |
| 4 | St Pancras railway station | Railway station | |
| 5 | The Shard | Skyscraper | |
| 6 | Hadrian's Wall | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 7 | Lincoln Cathedral | Cathedral | |
| 8 | St Paul's Cathedral | Cathedral | |
| 9 | Canterbury Cathedral | Cathedral | ✓ |
| 10 | Hampton Court Palace | Palace | |
| 11 | Gloucester Cathedral | Cathedral | |
| 12 | Durdle Door | Natural arch | |
| 13 | Windsor Castle | Palace | |
| 14 | Tower Bridge | Bridge | |
| 15 | Salisbury Cathedral | Cathedral | |
| 16 | Blenheim Palace | Manor house | ✓ |
| 17 | Wells Cathedral | Cathedral | |
| 18 | British Museum | Museum | |
| 19 | Bodiam Castle | Castle | |
| 20 | Old Man of Hoy | Stack | |
| 21 | Victoria and Albert Museum | Museum | |
| 22 | Isle of Skye | Island | |
| 23 | Westminster Abbey | Church building | ✓ |
| 24 | Highgate Cemetery | Cemetery | |
| 25 | Ely Cathedral | Cathedral | |
| 26 | Big Ben | Clock tower | |
| 27 | Durham Cathedral | Cathedral | ✓ |
| 28 | Castle Howard | Manor house | |
| 29 | National Gallery | Museum |
01 Stonehenge
United Kingdom51.179° N 1.826° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by diego_torres from Pixabay Stonehenge wasn't built — it was built, rebuilt, and rearranged over roughly 1,500 years, and what stands today is really the last of several distinct monuments on the same spot. The earliest phase, a circular ditch and bank enclosing cremated human remains, dates to around 3000 BCE.
Did you know? Studies published in 2024 traced the Altar Stone not to Wales but to the Orcadian Basin of north-east Scotland, roughly 700 km away.
02 White Cliffs of Dover
United Kingdom · 4 km from Dover51.135° N 1.357° E
Image by vjkombajn from Pixabay The White Cliffs of Dover stand on both sides of the port of Dover for about 13 km, a wall of chalk up to 110 metres high facing the narrowest part of the Channel. On a clear day France is visible 32 km away, and from France the cliffs are visible in turn.
Did you know? Over the past 150 years the cliffs have retreated by roughly 22 to 32 cm a year, several times faster than the 2 to 6 cm estimated for earlier millennia.
03 Natural History Museum
United Kingdom · 4 km from London51.496° N 0.176° W
Image by DenisDoukhan from Pixabay South Kensington's great terracotta building was designed as a cathedral of nature, and it still reads like one. Alfred Waterhouse took over the commission after Captain Francis Fowke, winner of the 1864 design competition, died in 1865, and reworked it in his own round-arched Romanesque manner. Construction ran from 1873 to 1880 and the museum opened on 18 April 1881.
Did you know? Workmen building the 1938 life-size blue whale model left a trapdoor in its belly for secret cigarette breaks, and sealed coins and a telephone directory inside.
04 St Pancras railway station
United Kingdom · 3.2 km from London51.530° N 0.125° W
Colin · CC BY-SA 3.0 St Pancras is two buildings that happen to be one: a vast iron train shed and, in front of it, a red-brick Gothic hotel that looks like a cathedral. The Midland Railway built the station after its trains were stuck for months on other companies' lines into London during the 1862 exhibition.
Did you know? In 1978 British Rail tried to sell the original Dent clock, but it shattered during removal and went to a retiring guard, Roland Hoggard, for £25.
05 The Shard
United Kingdom · 2.2 km from London51.504° N 0.087° W
Ввласенко · CC BY-SA 3.0 6 m over London Bridge station, the tallest building in the United Kingdom and in Western Europe.
Did you know? The tower appeared on screen before it existed: Children of Men, released in 2006 and set in 2027, added it to London's skyline with a model and CGI.
06 Hadrian's Wall
United Kingdom55.024° N 2.292° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by 18623647 from Pixabay Hadrian's Wall crosses the whole width of northern England, from Wallsend on the River Tyne in the east to Bowness-on-Solway on the Solway Firth in the west — 80 Roman miles, or about 117 km. The Emperor Hadrian ordered it built in AD 122 to mark the northern edge of the province of Britannia.
Did you know? The wall inspired the giant ice Wall in George R. R. Martin's fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire.
07 Lincoln Cathedral
United Kingdom53.234° N 0.536° W
Image by TimHill from Pixabay The Victorian critic John Ruskin thought Lincoln Cathedral the most precious piece of architecture in the British Isles, worth any two other English cathedrals, and on its ridge above the flat Lincolnshire countryside it is easy to see why he said it. The first cathedral was begun in 1072 by the Norman bishop Remigius and consecrated in 1092.
Did you know? The cathedral stood in for Westminster Abbey in The Da Vinci Code after the abbey refused filming, and for Notre-Dame in Ridley Scott's Napoleon (2023).
08 St Paul's Cathedral
United Kingdom · 1.9 km from London51.514° N 0.098° W
Image by adchimchaechill from Pixabay St Paul's Cathedral is Sir Christopher Wren's masterpiece and the building that gave London its skyline for three centuries. Its dome, rising 111 metres to the cross on Ludgate Hill, the highest point in the City of London, was the tallest thing in London from 1710 to 1963.
Did you know? The rebuilding was paid for largely by a special tax levied on coal arriving in London, not from the royal purse.
09 Canterbury Cathedral
United Kingdom · 22.2 km from Dover51.280° N 1.083° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by WolfBlur from Pixabay Canterbury Cathedral is the mother church of the Church of England and of the worldwide Anglican Communion, and the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Augustine, sent from Rome by Pope Gregory the Great to convert the Anglo-Saxons, founded it in 597.
Did you know? Henry VIII reputedly summoned the dead Becket on a charge of treason; when he failed to appear, his shrine's treasures were carted off in two chests and 26 carts.
10 Hampton Court Palace
United Kingdom · 18.8 km from London51.403° N 0.337° W
Image by LaraHughes from Pixabay Hampton Court is two palaces in one: a red-brick Tudor palace of turreted gatehouses, twisted chimneys and a great hall, and, grafted onto it, a Baroque palace by Sir Christopher Wren built to answer Versailles. Set beside the Thames about 19 km south-west of central London, it was begun in 1514 by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Henry VIII's chief minister, who meant it to be the finest house in England.
Did you know? Henry VIII was so impatient for his Great Hall that the masons were made to work through the night by candlelight.
11 Gloucester Cathedral
United Kingdom51.867° N 2.247° W
Geni · CC BY-SA 4.0 Gloucester Cathedral is best understood as two buildings wearing one skin. The heavy Norman church begun by Abbot Serlo in 1089 still stands underneath — you feel it in the squat round piers of the nave — but in the fourteenth century the monks wrapped its eastern half in a lattice of tall, thin Perpendicular tracery, as if a stone cage had been lowered over the Romanesque walls.
Did you know? The church began as a minster founded around 679 by Osric, King of the Hwicce, with his relative Kyneburg as its first abbess.
12 Durdle Door
United Kingdom · 29.2 km from Bournemouth50.621° N 2.277° W
Image by TheDigitalArtist from Pixabay Durdle Door is a natural arch of Portland limestone standing in the sea off the Dorset coast near Lulworth, one of the best-known landmarks of the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site.
Did you know? The 2022 Doctor Who special The Power of the Doctor and the 1997 film Wilde both used the arch as a location.
13 Windsor Castle
United Kingdom · 26.1 km from Reading51.484° N 0.604° W
Image by diego_torres from Pixabay Windsor Castle has been a royal residence for more than nine centuries, which makes it the longest-occupied palace in Europe and the largest castle in the world that is still lived in. Its plan is the one William the Conqueror laid down in the decade after 1066: a motte-and-bailey castle with its wards gathered around a central mound, on a ridge above the Thames.
Did you know? Edward III spent £51,000 rebuilding Windsor between 1350 and 1377, the largest sum any medieval English king spent on a single building project.
14 Tower Bridge
United Kingdom · 3 km from London51.506° N 0.075° W
Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay Tower Bridge was the answer to a very Victorian problem: how to join the fast-growing East End to the south bank without cutting off the ships that still unloaded in the Pool of London, between London Bridge and the Tower. A conventional fixed bridge at street level would have blocked their masts.
Did you know? In 1952 a double-decker bus was caught on the bridge as it began to open, and the driver accelerated across the widening gap, earning a ten-pound bonus.
15 Salisbury Cathedral
United Kingdom · 37.9 km from Bournemouth51.065° N 1.798° W
Image by diego_torres from Pixabay Salisbury Cathedral was built in one go, which is rare for an English cathedral and is what gives it its calm. The foundation stones were laid in 1220 on open meadows by the rivers, after the clergy abandoned the cramped hilltop of Old Sarum a couple of miles to the north, and the nave, transepts and choir were complete by 1258. Only the cloister, the chapter house and, by 1330, the tower and spire were added later.
Did you know? Because the water table beneath the meadows is so high, the cathedral rests on foundations only about four feet (1.2 m) deep.
16 Blenheim Palace
United Kingdom · 12.6 km from Oxford51.841° N 1.361° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Jvhertum · Public domain Blenheim Palace, at Woodstock in Oxfordshire, was the nation's reward to John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, for his victory over the French and Bavarians at Blenheim in 1704. The Crown gave him the old royal manor of Woodstock, Parliament voted money, and work began in 1705; the palace was finished in 1722.
Did you know? Blenheim has appeared more than seventy times in film and television productions.
17 Wells Cathedral
United Kingdom · 27 km from Bristol51.210° N 2.644° W
Diliff · CC BY-SA 3.0 Wells is a small market city, and its cathedral is out of all proportion to it. Begun around 1175, it was designed from the start in the new pointed style, and the architectural historian John Harvey called it the first truly Gothic building in Europe. It became a cathedral in the thirteenth century after a long tug-of-war between Wells, Bath and Glastonbury, which is why the bishop is still "of Bath and Wells".
Did you know? The west front is about 45 metres wide and 30 metres high.
18 British Museum
United Kingdom · 2 km from London51.519° N 0.127° W
Jumk18 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The British Museum, in the Bloomsbury district of London, was founded in 1753 as the first public national museum in the world and opened to visitors in 1759. It grew from the collection of the physician Sir Hans Sloane, who left some 71,000 objects to the nation, and it now holds about eight million objects covering human history from its earliest tools to the present.
19 Bodiam Castle
United Kingdom51.002° N 0.544° E
Image by diego_torres from Pixabay Bodiam Castle is what many people picture when they think of a medieval castle: a square of sandstone walls with round towers at the corners, battlements, a twin-towered gatehouse, all reflected in a wide moat. The historian Charles Coulson called it the popular ideal of a medieval castle, and the military historian Cathcart King called it the most complete surviving example of a quadrangular castle in England.
Did you know? The castle's 28 latrines emptied straight into the moat, which one archaeologist has described as effectively an open sewer.
20 Old Man of Hoy
United Kingdom · 29.2 km from Kirkwall58.886° N 3.432° W
Stephen Temple from Cape Town, South Africa · CC BY-SA 2.0 The Old Man of Hoy is a 137 m tower of red sandstone standing alone off the west coast of Hoy in Orkney, one of the tallest sea stacks in Britain. It rises from a plinth of dark basalt, separated from the cliffs by a gap about 60 m wide, with sheer, ledged sides and a summit only a few metres across.
Did you know? In 2013 Red Széll, with only about five per cent of his sight, became the first blind person to climb the stack.
21 Victoria and Albert Museum
United Kingdom · 3.7 km from London51.497° N 0.172° W
Image by 139904 from Pixabay 8 million objects spanning 5,000 years. It traces its origins to the Government School of Design of 1832. Its first director, Henry Cole, meant it to educate the public and improve British industry by showing makers the best of everything.
22 Isle of Skye
United Kingdom57.350° N 6.300° W
Image by FrankyFromGermany from Pixabay Skye is shaped like a hand of rock spread out on the sea: a mountainous core, and from it a ring of peninsulas — Trotternish, Waternish, Duirinish, Minginish, Sleat — separated by sea lochs that cut so deep that nowhere on the island is more than about 8 km from salt water.
Did you know? The MV Glenachulish, which crosses the Kyle Rhea strait between Skye and Glenelg, is the last turntable ferry still operating anywhere in the world.
23 Westminster Abbey
United Kingdom · 0.7 km from London51.499° N 0.127° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay Westminster Abbey, formally the Collegiate Church of Saint Peter at Westminster, has been the setting of English and British coronations since 1066: forty monarchs have been crowned here, eighteen are buried here, and at least sixteen royal weddings have taken place since 1100. The site began as a Benedictine monastery founded around 959 on Thorney Island, then an island in the Thames.
Did you know? David Hockney designed a 2018 window celebrating Elizabeth II, a blossoming Yorkshire hawthorn scene, on an iPad to mimic light passing through glass.
24 Highgate Cemetery
United Kingdom · 7.5 km from London51.567° N 0.147° W
JohnArmagh · Public domain Highgate Cemetery climbs a south-facing hillside in north London just below the top of Highgate Hill, next to Waterlow Park. It opened in 1839 as one of the "Magnificent Seven" private cemeteries built around the edge of the city when the old churchyards had run out of room, and the architect Stephen Geary laid out the original western part. An eastern extension across Swain's Lane opened in 1860.
Did you know? Its overgrown Gothic atmosphere drew horror film-makers, and it appears in Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970) and Tales from the Crypt (1972).
25 Ely Cathedral
United Kingdom · 24.2 km from Cambridge52.399° N 0.264° E
Bs0u10e01 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Ely Cathedral is called the Ship of the Fens, and on the flat land of Cambridgeshire you understand why: its towers are visible for miles across the drained fields, riding above the little city like a hull on water. It began as an abbey founded in 672 by St Etheldreda, an East Anglian princess, whose shrine drew pilgrims for centuries.
Did you know? Its stone came from Barnack quarries owned by Peterborough Abbey, reportedly paid for with 8,000 eels a year.
26 Big Ben
United Kingdom · 0.4 km from London51.501° N 0.125° W
Image by pemacallan from Pixabay Everyone calls the tower Big Ben, but that name actually belongs to the bell inside it — the Great Bell of the Great Clock of Westminster — and the tower itself wasn't even called Elizabeth Tower until 2012, when it was renamed for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. Before that it was simply the Clock Tower, which undersells what a fight it took to get built.
Did you know? The Great Bell cracked months after it first rang in 1859; instead of recasting it, workers turned it an eighth of a turn, and it still rings cracked.
27 Durham Cathedral
United Kingdom · 24.2 km from Newcastle upon Tyne54.773° N 1.576° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by jimsumo999 from Pixabay Durham Cathedral stands on a wooded rock almost enclosed by a loop of the River Wear, sharing the peninsula with the castle of the prince-bishops. It was built largely between 1093 and 1133, and UNESCO, listing cathedral and castle together in 1986, called it the largest and most perfect monument of the Norman style in England.
Did you know? Scenes for the first two Harry Potter films were shot here, and the cathedral also appears in Avengers: Endgame.
28 Castle Howard
United Kingdom · 21.9 km from York54.121° N 0.906° W
Image by Pexels from Pixabay Castle Howard is one of the grandest houses in England, a Baroque palace set on a ridge about 15 miles (24 km) north of York. It was commissioned by the 3rd Earl of Carlisle and designed from 1699 by John Vanbrugh, a fellow member of the Kit-Cat Club who had never designed a building before, assisted by the far more practised Nicholas Hawksmoor.
Did you know? Building the house dragged on from 1701 to 1811, so it took more than a century and three generations of earls to finish.
29 National Gallery
United Kingdom · 1 km from London51.509° N 0.128° W
Rhododendrites · CC BY-SA 4.0 The National Gallery was founded in a way unlike most European national galleries: not from a royal collection, but in 1824 when the British government bought 38 paintings from the heirs of the banker John Julius Angerstein. Private gifts built the rest; they still account for about two-thirds of the collection.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful film locations in the United Kingdom?
- On our list, Stonehenge ranks first, followed by White Cliffs of Dover and Natural History Museum.
- Which cathedral was used for Hogwarts?
- The cloisters of Gloucester Cathedral, with some of the earliest fan vaulting in England, appear as Hogwarts corridors in several Harry Potter films.
- Why did Lincoln Cathedral stand in for Westminster Abbey?
- Westminster Abbey refused permission to film The Da Vinci Code (2006), so the scenes set there were shot at Lincoln Cathedral, with Winchester Cathedral also used.
- Which film made Sycamore Gap famous?
- Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) included a scene at Sycamore Gap, a dip in Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland where a lone sycamore stood until it was felled in 2023.
- How many film locations are on this list in the United Kingdom?
- The list covers 29 film locations.