CREDITS SPIDER-MAN, 2002 dir: Sam Raimi Tobey Maguire Kirsten Dunst Willem Dafoe James Franco

Like Ghostbusters, with which it shares a good few locations, Sam Raimi’s film of the Stan Lee comic is set in New York, but mostly shot around LA.

Aunt May’s home, where Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) lives, is on 69th Road between Metropolitan Avenue and Sybilla Street in Forest Hills, central Queens, among streets of near-identical houses. It’s a way to the northwest, in Woodside, that he runs for the school bus, along 44th Street at Queens Boulevard.

The school field-trip is to Columbia University, up in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights (seen in Ghostbusters). It’s at the steps of the Low Memorial Library that Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe) drops off young Harry (James Franco), but the university interior, where Parker gets the fateful spider bite, is over on the west coast. Itís the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, 900 Exposition Boulevard, downtown LA (tel: 213.763.DINO), which also masquerades as ‘New York’ in Brian de Palma’s Bonfire of the Vanities and is also seen in Spawn.

Spider-Man location: Parker arrives for the field trip in New York: Columbia University

It’s outside another Ghostbusters location, the New York Public Library, Fifth Avenue, that Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson) leaves Parker, warning him “With great power comes great responsibility”.

Down in Soho, Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) works in the Moondance Diner, 80 Sixth Avenue at Grand Street (tel: 212.226.1191). A genuine thirties diner, and good value, too, the Moondance was seen not only in Igby Goes Down, but was the diner in which Griffin Dunne spends much of the increasingly frantic night in Martin Scorsese’s After Hours.

Spider-Man location: The diner in which Mary Jane works: Moondance Diner, Sixth Avenue, New York

‘Midtown High School’ is, yes, in LA. The interiors were filmed in Dorsey High School, 3575 Farmdale Avenue, at Rodeo Road, West Adams, midtown. The graduation ceremony was filmed in front of the Thalberg Building on the Sony lot in Culver City. You can see the site, along with plenty of other goodies (it’s your chance to see a clutch of Oscars up close), on the Sony Pictures Studio Tour. The tour takes in what is left from the old MGM backlot, most of which was sold off (tel: 323.520.TOUR).

Back to Queens, as Parker, after discovering his secret powers, runs off down Austin Street at the junction with Ascan Avenue in Forest Hills.

Spider-Man location: The exterior of Norman Osborne's New York mansion: Tudor City, East 40th Street, Manhattan

Norman Osborn’s Gothic Manhattan mansion is the Tudor City complex, East 40th to East 43rd Street between First and Second Avenues, overlooking the East River, midtown (also the site of the attempted bomb attack in Brian de Palma’s Scarface and home to Tom Hanks in Ron Howard’s Splash!).

Spider-Man location: The interior of Norman Osborne's 'New York' mansion: Greystone Mansion, Beverly Hills

The interior, once again, is in Los Angeles. This time it’s the Greystone Mansion, 905 Loma Vista Drive in Beverly Hills. This palatial mansion isn’t open to the public, but the extensive formal gardens are (and admission is free). The mansion has been seen in numerous films including, yes, Ghostbusters. It was the interior of the ‘Pasadena’' mansion in the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski as well as of Jack Nicholson’s 'Massachusetts' home in The Witches of Eastwick and the mansion of Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige. Its other screen appearances include All Of Me, The Disorderly Orderly, Death Becomes Her and Indecent Proposal.

Likewise, although the ‘Daily Bugle’ building is the famous Flatiron Building, 175 Fifth Avenue, seen in Bell, Book and Candle, Warren Beatty’s Reds and the 1998 Godzilla, the newspaper office interior is the Pacific Electric Building, 610 South Main Street, downtown LA, familiar from films such as Curtis Hanson’s LA Confidential, David Fincher’s Se7en and John Woo’s Face/Off.

Spidey swinging through the ‘Manhattan’ streets was filmed around downtown LA, at Fourth Street between Beaudry Avenue and Hill Street; Grand Avenue between Third Street and Hope Place; Fifth Street between Los Angeles Street and Hill Street; Spring Street between Fourth and Fifth Street. Wide shots show Manhattanís real Times Square, but most of the Green Goblin’s deadly attack on the World Unity parade was filmed on a set built at the Rockwell Defense Plant, Bellflower and Imperial Highway in Downey, California.

Spider-Man location: The ‘upside-down kiss’: The ‘New York Street’, Warner Bros backlot, Burbank

And you can see the site of the ‘upside down kiss’ on the New York Street on the excellent Warner Bros VIP Studio Tour.

The Goblin’s attack on the aerial tramway was mostly mocked up in the studio. The Roosevelt Island Tramway runs from Second Avenue, between East 59th and East 60th Streets, alongside the Queensborough Bridge, to Roosevelt Island (where parts of the first two Exorcist movies were shot). The tramway can be seen in City Slickers and gets hijacked by terrorists in the 1981 Sly Stallone actioner Nighthawks.