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BooksApproximate

Pride and Prejudice: Longbourn to Pemberley

Netherfield Park is let at last, and Austen's novel follows Elizabeth Bennet from her family's village to a Kent parsonage and on to Derbyshire. The houses of the book are described rather than mapped, so this route follows the real places where the 2005 film and the 1995 BBC series found them. Nine stops follow the story in order, from Longbourn to the inn at Lambton. Each pin is a real filming site standing in for a place in the book; only Gracechurch Street is the real London street the novel itself names.

9 locations5/9 visitable

BooksFictional

The Great Gatsby: From the Eggs to the Plaza

Fitzgerald set The Great Gatsby on two invented peninsulas, West Egg and East Egg, but he built them from the Long Island he knew in Great Neck, where he lived from October 1922. Behind the glamour sit a dump, a station and a hotel suite that were all real. This route follows Nick from the Eggs through the valley of ashes, Penn Station, the Queensboro Bridge and the Plaza Hotel. The Eggs, the valley and Gatsby's house are invented, so their pins mark the real places the novel is read against.

7 locations4/7 visitable

GamesApproximate

L.A. Noire: 1947 Los Angeles, Street by Street

L.A. Noire rebuilds Los Angeles in 1947 with fanatical care: the studio mapped the real streets, modelled building interiors on the originals, and filled the map with the city's landmarks. Detective Cole Phelps drives that recreation through traffic, homicide, vice and arson cases, and much of the city he moves through is still standing. This tour follows the real places behind the game's map, from Union Station and Bunker Hill to Wilshire's art deco and the Hollywood movie palaces, then down to the river where the story ends. Every pin marks a real site the game put on its streets.

8 locations8/8 visitable

MoviesApproximate

No Time to Die: From Matera to Safin's Island

Bond's final outing opens beside a lake in Norway and closes on an island in the Faroe Islands, with a long detour through southern Italy and a retirement in Jamaica in between. The story's geography is real: Matera's cave lanes, a bridge over the Gravina gorge, a railway station at Sapri, a waterfront house at Port Antonio, the Atlantic Ocean Road and the cliffs of Kalsoy. The route follows the film's order — the frozen-lake flashback, the grave and the bridge, the Matera car chase, the farewell at Sapri, five quiet years in Jamaica and the 'Cuban' harbour that is really Port Antonio, then the Norway drive and the villain's island in the Faroe Islands. The beach house in Jamaica and the lake house in Norway were sets, both since dismantled.

8 locations6/8 visitable

MoviesApproximate

Oppenheimer: From Cambridge to Trinity

J. Robert Oppenheimer studies in Cambridge and Göttingen, builds a physics school at Berkeley, and is handed the one job nobody else wants: build the atomic bomb before the Nazis do. Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer (2023) follows him from the Cavendish Laboratory to a secret mesa in New Mexico, through the Trinity test and the political fallout that ends his career. This route follows the film's real places — Cambridge, Göttingen, LeConte Hall, Los Alamos, Trinity, the White House, the Institute for Advanced Study and the room where his security clearance was revoked. The film's own stand-ins, from Ghost Ranch to Kerckhoff Hall, Belen and Alhambra, are noted at each stop.

8 locations7/8 visitable

MoviesApproximate

Back to the Future: Hill Valley in Los Angeles

Hill Valley is fictional, but almost all of it is Los Angeles. The 1985 film sends Marty McFly thirty years back to a small California town, and the filmmakers built its square on a studio backlot and dressed real malls, schools, churches and houses around the city as Hill Valley. This route follows the story from the Twin Pines Mall car park in City of Industry through 1955 and back to the McFly home in Arleta. Each stop is a real place that played a piece of Hill Valley; the private homes are seen from the street only.

8 locations5/8 visitable

MoviesApproximate

Forrest Gump: Savannah to Monument Valley

A feather drifts down onto a bench in Savannah, and a man starts to talk. His life unrolls across half a century of American history, from an Alabama childhood to the jungles of Vietnam, the Lincoln Memorial, the Watergate and a bayou shrimp boat. This route follows the film in order, from the bench on Chippewa Square to the lighthouse in Maine and the desert where the running finally stops. It marks the real locations and the real stand-ins, since the fictional town of Greenbow and the Vietnam jungle were both played by South Carolina.

9 locations7/9 visitable

GamesApproximate

Forza Horizon 4: A Britain Road Trip

Forza Horizon 4, released on 2 October 2018, turns Great Britain into one giant racetrack: an open world with condensed representations of Edinburgh, the Scottish Highlands, the Lake District and the Cotswolds, where seasons change every week and Derwentwater freezes hard enough to drive across. Microsoft counted 24 million players by November 2020, and Polygon found the game world a theme-park version of England where everything has "the faint whiff of an idealised 1950s about it, a place of ordered pub gardens and rosebushes". This route drives the real Britain behind the game, north to south: Edinburgh's Old Town, Bamburgh Castle on its coastal crag, three Lake District stops at Derwentwater, Ambleside and Tarn Hows, and the honey-coloured village of Broadway in the Cotswolds. Every stop can be visited today.

6 locations6/6 visitable

MoviesApproximate

The Sound of Music: Salzburg and the Salzkammergut

The 1965 film of Maria von Trapp's life was shot on real locations around Salzburg between March and September 1964, and almost all of them can still be visited. This route follows Maria from the mountain meadow and her abbey through the fountains and gardens of the song sequences to the villa terrace, the wedding church and the festival hall where the family sings its way to freedom. The stops run in story order, from the Bavarian opening to the festival escape. One caveat: the famous cemetery hiding place never existed; it was a Hollywood studio set modelled on St Peter's Graveyard.

8 locations8/8 visitable

MoviesFictional

Jurassic Park: From Kauaʻi to Kualoa Ranch

Jurassic Park (1993) invents a dinosaur theme park on an island that does not exist, then shoots almost all of it on one small Hawaiian island, Kauaʻi. On 11 September 1992, the last scheduled day of the Kauaʻi shoot, Hurricane Iniki passed directly over the island and pushed one famous sequence to a ranch on Oʻahu. Nine stops follow the film in story order: the garden of the opening attack, the stream that played a Dominican amber mine, the Kapaʻa waterfront that played a Costa Rica café, the falls every visitor flies past, the estate where the visitor centre façade stood, the gates below Mount Waiʻaleʻale, the canyon of the dead fence, the Gallimimus stampede at Kualoa Ranch and the garden where Grant finds the nest. Filming on Kauaʻi began on 24 August 1992.

9 locations5/9 visitable

GamesFictional

GTA IV: The Real New York Behind Liberty City

Liberty City is New York with the labels peeled off. Grand Theft Auto IV rebuilds four of the boroughs, borrows New Jersey for the state across the river, and copies in the Statue of Liberty, the Coney Island Cyclone, the Manhattan Bridge, Times Square and the Empire State Building — then renames nearly all of them, so the game's Liberty statue holds a takeaway coffee instead of a torch. The story is set in 2008, the year the game arrived. This route pins nine real places behind those names: the triumphal arch at Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza, the wooden Cyclone at Coney Island, the Manhattan Bridge as the Algonquin Bridge, Brighton Beach as Hove Beach, the surviving 1964 World's Fair site in Queens, and three Manhattan landmarks — Middle Park, Star Junction and the Rotterdam Tower. Each stop names the in-game location it stands in for. One caveat: Rockstar deliberately avoided a precise recreation of New York, so expect the landmarks, not the street plan.

9 locations9/9 visitable

MoviesApproximate

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: From Utah to the Grail

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) sends Indy from a Boy Scout outing in the Utah desert to the rock-cut façade of Petra, chasing the Holy Grail and his missing father. Three trials guard the cup at the end. The film borrows its scenery from half of Europe, the Middle East and the American West. Nine stops, most of them still standing: the Arches canyons of the opening, the church façade in Venice's Campo San Barnaba that plays the library, an Eifel castle dressed as Brunwald, a San Francisco building that played Berlin's Tempelhof airport, the Almería beach where Henry brings down a fighter with an umbrella, a Granada station playing Alexandretta, the Tabernas tank chase, the Treasury that fronts the Grail's temple, and the Texas sunset the film ends on. Dates are story time; filming ran from May 1988 to early 1989.

9 locations8/9 visitable

MoviesApproximate

Star Wars: Beyond Tatooine

Tatooine is the Star Wars desert everyone knows, but the films kept finding other corners of the Earth for their galaxy: redwoods in northern California, a villa on Lake Como, a plaza in Seville, the desert around an oasis in Abu Dhabi, a monastery island off County Kerry and the largest salt flat in the world, in Bolivia. This route follows the shooting in the order the films were made, from the Endor forest of Return of the Jedi to the Crait battle of The Last Jedi. Two stops mark an area rather than a spot: the Endor scenes were partly shot on private land, and no source names the stretch of desert that stood in for Jakku.

6 locations5/6 visitable

MoviesApproximate

Game of Thrones: Winterfell and the Wall in Northern Ireland

Much of Game of Thrones' North was filmed in Northern Ireland. Winterfell, its godswood, Castle Black, the Kingsroad and a fishing harbour that played Pyke were all real ground dressed as Westeros, and a basalt hillside above a small Antrim village hosts the first execution of the series. The route runs in the order the episodes aired: the deserter's beheading above Cairncastle and the Winterfell of Castle Ward, then the quarry that held Castle Black and the Wall, the godswood, the Kingsroad beech avenue and the harbour where Theon Greyjoy comes home. The last stop is the Moneyglass estate, where a bigger Winterfell was built for the second season and used again for the eighth season's battle. Almost everything here is exterior: Winterfell's great hall was a soundstage set.

7 locations4/7 visitable

HistoryApproximate

D-Day: The Five Normandy Beaches

Just after midnight on 6 June 1944, gliders landed beside a canal bridge at Bénouville, and by mid-morning Allied troops were ashore on five code-named beaches — Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword — along the Normandy coast. This route visits the places where that day was won and lost, and what stands there today. It starts with the glider coup de main at Pegasus Bridge, then runs along the coast from west to east: the museum built on the sand at Utah, the Rangers' climb at Pointe du Hoc, the American cemetery above Omaha, the concrete of the Mulberry harbour at Arromanches, the Canadian centre behind Juno and the Grand Bunker above Sword.

7 locations7/7 visitable

MoviesApproximate

Outlander: Claire's Scotland

Outlander's Scotland: the standing stones of Craigh na Dun near Kinloch Rannoch, Doune as Castle Leoch, Culross as Cranesmuir and Culloden moor. Claire, a twentieth-century nurse, touches a stone and wakes in 1743; a highlander knocks out the officer chasing her, and she marries Jamie Fraser to stay out of his reach. They start near Kinloch Rannoch, where the production found its Craigh na Dun, then move to the real castles and villages playing Castle Leoch, Fort William, Cranesmuir and Lallybroch, and to a Fife castle standing in for a French abbey. The last stop is Culloden, the moor where Claire and Jamie say goodbye in the second-season finale. One caveat: the standing stones on screen are a built set. The Bronze Age Clava Cairns near Inverness that fans often visit are said to have inspired them, but they are not where the circle was filmed.

7 locations6/7 visitable

HistoryApproximate

Titanic: From Belfast to Halifax

Belfast built her, Southampton sailed her, and two tender ports filled her up before the Atlantic took her. This route follows the whole last leg of Titanic's maiden voyage in order — from the Belfast slipway where 100,000 people watched her leave the ways to the Halifax cemetery where 121 of her dead are buried. Six stops: the shipyard that became a museum, the Southampton quayside and its memorial to the engineers who stayed at their posts, the two Channel ports where tenders ferried passengers out to a ship too big to come alongside, the wreck on the seabed at 12,500 feet, and the graves at Fairview Lawn. Only the wreck is out of reach; every other stop can be walked today.

6 locations5/6 visitable

MoviesFictional

La La Land: Mia and Seb's Los Angeles

A jazz pianist and an aspiring actress argue through the windows of their cars in a Los Angeles traffic jam, and the city itself becomes the romance: a night on a funicular, a broken projector, a kiss in a planetarium. Damien Chazelle shot La La Land in 40 days across Los Angeles in the summer of 2015, and most of the places the couple reaches for are still there. This route follows Mia and Sebastian from the freeway ramps where they shout at each other to the jazz bar Seb finally gets to open — the 105/110 connector ramps, the Burbank café on the Warner lot, the Lighthouse Café and the pier beside it, the Rialto in South Pasadena, Griffith Observatory and Angels Flight. The film rarely names its own locations, so a few pins mark the real building that stood in for the one on screen.

9 locations5/9 visitable

MoviesApproximate

Call Me by Your Name: From the Perlmans' Villa to the Serio Falls

In the summer of 1983 a seventeen-year-old boy and a twenty-four-year-old American share a house in rural Lombardy: Elio Perlman, who reads too much and plays the piano too well, and Oliver, the graduate student his father hired for the summer. One long, hot, awkward season, and neither of them handles it gracefully. It ends with a telephone call and a boy by a fireplace; it was shot, almost scene by scene, in real places you can still stand in. This route follows the filming from the Perlmans' villa at Moscazzano through Crema's piazza, a Roman villa on Lake Garda and a war memorial at Pandino, out to the meadow at Capralba where Elio makes his move, and then north for the last three days in Bergamo — the country's tallest waterfall, a pensione in the upper town, a drunken night outside Santa Maria Maggiore, and the small station south of Crema that stands in for Clusone. Principal photography ran from 9 May to the end of June 2016, and the villa is a private home, so a few stops are best seen from the street.

9 locations8/9 visitable

MoviesApproximate

The Godfather: From Staten Island to Sicily

The Godfather was filmed on Staten Island, on Mott Street and in Sicily, where Savoca and Forza d'Agrò play Corleone. Michael is pulled into the family war, flees to Sicily, loses Apollonia to a car bomb and settles every score during his nephew's baptism. Coppola shot the film on real locations around New York City and Sicily: the Staten Island house that played the compound, the Mott Street block of the Genco Olive Oil front, the villages of Savoca and Forza d'Agrò that play Corleone, the bar and church of Michael's courtship, the villa of the bombing, and the Little Italy cathedral of the baptism climax.

7 locations5/7 visitable

GamesFictional

Yakuza / Like a Dragon: Kamurocho, Sotenbori and Ijincho

Kazuma Kiryu's Kamurocho feels like a real Tokyo night out because it nearly is: Sega modelled it on Kabukicho, then did the same with Dotonbori, Shinsekai, Yokohama and the port town of Onomichi. Every district in the series is based on its real location as it looked in the year its game came out, and later games remodel them again. This route walks the six real stand-ins behind the fiction in the order the games introduced them: Kabukicho's sleepless streets, the theater square, Dotonbori's neon canal, Shinsekai's tower, Onomichi's temple slopes and Yokohama's Isezaki Mall. All six are ordinary public places you can visit today.

6 locations6/6 visitable

GamesFictional

GTA V: The Real Los Angeles Behind Los Santos

Los Santos feels like Los Angeles because it is Los Angeles, compressed. Grand Theft Auto V squeezes the city's most famous miles into one playable map, from a hillside sign to a Venice boardwalk. This tour visits seven real stand-ins behind the fiction: the hillside sign, a movie palace, a luxury shopping street, an observatory, a pier, a beach and a towered folk-art park. Every pin marks the real place, and each stop names the game location it doubles for. Expect crowds at the beach and on Hollywood Boulevard, and quiet at the towers.

7 locations7/7 visitable

BooksApproximate

Three Men in a Boat: Kingston to Oxford

Jerome K. Jerome's 1889 comic novel sends three friends, J., George and Harris, and the dog Montmorency up the Thames in a rowing skiff, from Kingston to Oxford, camping out for a fortnight. What follows is one of the funniest books ever written about getting nowhere fast: a hedge maze with a guide who cannot find the exit, a punt run down at sunset, a dog who treats every cat as a personal enemy, and a provision-buying procession that staggers the whole town. The route follows the boat in the book's own order: Kingston's back streets, Hampton Court's maze, the lock opposite Weybridge where George joins them, the island where King John is said to have signed the Charter, tea below Cookham, a night in Marlow, Henley before the regatta, the old walls of Wallingford, and the difficult last mile into Oxford.

9 locations8/9 visitable

MoviesApproximate

Pachinko: From Yeongdo to Osaka

Sunja grows up in her mother's boarding house on Yeongdo, an island in the harbour of Busan, under Japanese rule. Pregnant by a married man, she marries a gentle minister instead and leaves with him for Osaka, where Koreans live poor and despised in a neighbourhood called Ikaino. The Apple TV+ series (2022–2024), based on Min Jin Lee's 2017 novel, follows four generations of her family from 1915 to 1989. The route follows the family through real places in Korea and Japan, in story order. Homes, shops and offices in the series are fictional, so the pins mark the neighbourhoods and cities where the story is set, not filming locations.

7 locations3/7 visitable