The Long Good Friday, 1980
Director
Cast
- Bob Hoskins
- Helen Mirren
- Derek Thompson
- Paul Freeman
- PH Moriarty
- Eddie Constantine
- Paul Barber
- Alan Ford
visit the film locations
London: Flights: Heathrow Airport; Gatwick Airport
Paddington Station, Praed Street, W2 (tube: District; Circle; Hammersmith & City; and Bakerloo Lines)
Stay at the Savoy Hotel, 1 Savoy Hill, on the Strand (tel: 020.7836.4343)
Eat Italian at Ask, 56-60 Wigmore Street (tel: 020.7935 2336) alongside Easley’s Mews or at Villa Elephant on the River, 135 Grosvenor Road (tel: 020 7834.1621)
Trivia
The Salisbury can be seen again in Richard Attenborough’s 1992 biopic Chaplin and in David Cronenberg’s Spider
The Long Good Friday filming location: Jeff at the pavement restaurant: Ask, Wigmore Street, London
Ask, 56-60 Wigmore Street alongside Easley’s Mews, was the ‘Boulevard Restaurant’. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy your meal here more than Jeff (Derek Thompson), Harold Shand’s right-hand man, who gets spat on during his clandestine meeting with the shady Councillor Harris (Bryan Marshall).
The Long Good Friday filming location: Harold finds Billy: The Waterman’s Arms, Isle of Dogs, London
The ‘Governor General’ pub, where Harold finds Billy (Nick Stringer) – “Walk to the car, Billy, or I’ll blow your spine off!” – is the famous Thamesfront pub The Waterman's Arms, 1 Glenaffric Avenue, on the Isle of Dogs.
It's a legendary boozer, famed for its live entertainment, and once owned by writer and broadcaster Dan Farson, one of the Fifties Bohemians of Soho’s Colony Room. The Isle of Dogs, if you don't know, is not an island, but an area of East London caught in a loop of the Thames. It's serviced by the Docklands Light Railway.
The Long Good Friday filming location: the exterior of Harold Shand’s club: Villa Elephant on the River, Grosvenor Road, Pimlico, London
The exterior of Harold’s casino is a private home, 15 Catherine Place, SW1, one of a street of handsome townhouses tucked away and forgotten in Victoria between Victoria Station and Buckingham Palace.
The Long Good Friday filming location: the interior of Harold Shand’s club: Villa Elephant on the River, Grosvenor Road, Pimlico, London
But the interior, where the unexploded bomb is discovered, and the lads collect their guns, is somewhere else entirely. In Pimlico, opposite Dolphin Square, Italian restaurant Villa Elephant on the River, 135 Grosvenor Road supplied the interior of the gaming club.
The Mafia contacts stay at the Savoy Hotel, 1 Savoy Hill, on the Strand, where Shand is abducted during the cracking ending (that’s Brosnan again, wielding the gun).
The Long Good Friday filming location: Harold Shand meets the American mobsters: The Savoy, the Strand, London
Movie actress Meryl Streep and her husband stay at the Savoy in the modern-day scenes of The French Lieutenant’s Woman; Catherine Zeta-Jones tails Sean Connery to the ‘Cryptonic’ building from here at the opening of Entrapment; and Ben Gates (Nicolas Cage) stays here with Riley Poole (Justin Bartha) while trying to absolve his great-grandfather of complicity in the assassination of Abe Lincoln in National Treasure: Book of Secrets.
Once a traditional turn-of-the-century hotel, the Savoy was perked up in 1929 with an unmistakable stainless steel, art-deco frontage on the Strand, the main theatre and shopping thoroughfare running east from Trafalgar Square to Fleet Street and the City.
The hotel is actually an addition to the Savoy Theatre, once home to the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, but since given a delicious thirties deco makeover (now painstakingly restored after a disastrous fire in 1990), which meant that when Mike Leigh came to make Topsy-Turvy, he had to use the unchanged Richmond Theatre as a substitute. The Savoy is closed until sometime later in 2010 for major restoration.
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