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- The Times: Shrewsbury is an overlooked market town that's an understudy for London
The Times: Shrewsbury is an overlooked market town that's an understudy for London
With the BBC's new adaption of Great Expectations, filmed on location here in Shrewsbury, set to hit our screens later this spring, The Times explores our magnificent town and discovers what exactly drew the production team here.
“Shrewsbury just keeps giving. It’s a medieval town with Tudor buildings and a castle and more than 600 listed buildings. Particularly for period drama, you want to see those tree rings. There are great streets [for filming] in a number of other places, but to peer around corners and see the whole lineage of history and be able to frame that beautifully in one shot is special.”
"Wyle Cop suggests that it can, in looks and as the UK’s longest uninterrupted stretch of independent shops. It’s terrific for idle browsing; I can recommend Tanner’s Wine Merchants, in a splendidly creaky former coaching inn. It was already in business when Dickens stayed a few yards away in the Lion hotel, in “the strangest little rooms, the ceilings of which I can touch with my hand”.
Off the hill’s summit I find Belmont, a handsome backstreet of estate agent dreams, all Georgian windows and Victorian gas lanterns. A nailed-on shoot location, you’d think, but no, not unless you count the house at No 6, from which the actor George C Scott yelled “You, boy!” as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. (A leaflet from the tourist office identifies locations from the 1984 film, including St Chad’s graveyard, where a stone still reads “Ebenezer Scrooge”.)"
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