CREDITS GOLDENEYE, 1995 dir: Martin Campbell Pierce Brosnan Sean Bean Judi Dench Izabella Scorupco Famke Janssen Alan Cumming Desmond Llewelyn Joe Don Baker Minnie Driver

The increasingly moribund Bond series was on the verge of retirement when it got a new lease of life with Pierce Brosnan.

The opening teaser, Bond’s spectacular bungee jump, at the ‘Arkangel Chemical Weapons Facility – USSR’, is actually the Tusker Dam, Lake Verzasca, at Hittnau in Switzerland.

Bond’s race with Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen), supposedly in the hills above Monte Carlo, uses the mountain roads around Thorenc, about 20 miles north of Grasse, way to the northwest. Nevertheless, Bond arrives at the Casino de Monte Carlo, Monaco, and it’s from the bay at Monte Carlo that Onatopp steals the Stealth helicopter.

M’s office is, finally, MI6’s real HQ, Vauxhall Cross, the spanking new building at 85 Albert Embankment on the Thames by Vauxhall Bridge. It turns up again, at the start of the river chase in The World Is Not Enough, and Pierce Brosnan turns up at the HQ as a somewhat shabbier, seedier agent in John Boorman's film of John Le Carre's The Tailor of Panama.

Although there is some real filming in St Petersburg in Russia, much of the tank chase was filmed on a massive set, built at the old Rolls Royce aircraft plant in Leavesden, Hertfordshire.

Many of the other Russian locations were filmed around the southeast of England: 'St Petersburg Airport', where Bond is met by Jack Wade (Joe Don Baker), is actually the Queen’s Stand, Epsom Racecourse, Epsom, Surrey.

Despite those Russian flags, the 'Grand Hotel Europe' is the Langham Hotel, 1c Portland Place W1, at the top of Regent Street opposite the BBC's Broadcasting House.

The 'St Petersburg' square, where Wade uses a sledgehammer to fix his motor, is the courtyard of the recently restored Somerset House on the Strand – which later became the 'Ministry of Defence' in Tomorrow Never Dies. This popular filming location can also be seen in Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow (as turn-of-the-century Manhattan), Billy Wilder's superb The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (as the 'Diogenes Club' where Holmes meets his older brother Mycroft (Christopher Lee)) and in Shanghai Knights (where Jackie Chan invents the kung fu movie at the end of the film).

The 'St Petersburg' square: Somerset House, The Strand (before its renovation)

The interior of the 'Russian' church is St Sofia’s Greek Cathedral, Moscow Road, Bayswater, W2 (seen also as a Russian church in The Music Lovers, Ken Russell's biopic of Tchaikovsky). The exterior is the rear (Fulham Road side) of the 1839 chapel in Brompton Cemetery, Old Brompton Road, Earl's Court, SW5. You might recognise this as the cemetery where Rowan Atkinson disrupts the funeral in Bond spoof Johnny English. This extravagantly Victorian graveyard also features in arty horror pic Afraid Of The Dark, Iain Softley's Henry James adaptation The Wings of the Dove, and bittersweet romantic comedy Jack and Sarah, with Richard E Grant.

The 'Russian' church: Brompton Cemetery, Earls Court

The 'St Petersburg' council chamber, where General Ourumov learns that Natalya (Izabella Scorupco) has survived the GoldenEye detonation, is the grandiose architecture of Draper’s Hall, Throgmorton Street, EC2 in the City of London (which also became 'Russia' for the Val Kilmer version of The Saint).

The railway scenes wewre filmed on the Nene Valley Railway, Peterborough.

The massive radio telescope dish is the Arecibo Observatory, Puerto Rico, seen also in Robert Zemeckis' Contact with Jodie Foster.


HARD COPY: For the details of the filming locations of 1,600 of your favourite movies, check out The Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations. 464 pages of fascinating facts, illustrated with over 1,000 original photographs.