Catalog
16 routes found
Bridgerton is set in London, but most of its streets are in Bath, its parks are in Wiltshire and its family home is in Greenwich. This route follows the filming locations from the Royal Crescent and Lady Danbury's house in Bath, through London and Kent, to the country houses that played Clyvedon and Aubrey Hall in the first two seasons.
Tommy Shelby's gang rules 1919 Birmingham, but the streets, trains and mansions you see on screen are mostly somewhere else. The route follows the story from Small Heath, through the Liverpool street that played Watery Lane, a Yorkshire railway, Aunt Polly's village and the Black Country, to Bradford's warehouses, Tommy's country house and the beach where series 4 ends. Most pins mark stand-ins, labelled as such.
A retired sake brewer set out on foot to measure Japan. Over ten surveys starting in 1800 Inō Tadataka and his team paced the coasts and paths of the country, and maps based on his work were still in use in 1924. The route follows his life in places: the brewer's house at Sawara, the shrine where he prayed before the first survey, Mount Hakodate and the far end of that journey in Hokkaido, Nihonbashi, his grave and the shrine that honours him. The surveys were separate expeditions, so the stops are not one connected walk.
After the 2016 earthquakes, Kumamoto Prefecture and One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda, who comes from the prefecture, answered with ten bronze statues of the Straw Hat Pirates, set up in towns across the region. The route visits them in the order they were unveiled, from Luffy at the prefectural office in 2018 to Jinbe by the sea in 2022, and tells why each crew member was sent where. The statues are real places to visit; the "Hino Country" story around them is the project's own.
Agent 47 has killed his way across the world in the Hitman trilogy, from a Paris fashion show to a skyscraper in Dubai. Behind the levels stand real cities, a real tower and a few real places that inspired invented ones. This route follows nine missions from the 2016 game to Hitman 3. Most venues are fictional, so the pins mark the city or the real place the designers named as a model, and each stop says which.
In December 1933, eighteen-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor set off from the Hook of Holland to walk to Constantinople, carrying a few clothes, some letters of introduction, an anthology of English verse and a volume of Horace. He slept in barns and shepherds' huts, but gentry and aristocracy kept inviting him into their country houses. He wrote the journey up decades later in A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water and The Broken Road. The route follows him through ten places the sources let us pin, from the Hook and a Stuttgart apartment to Melk, Vienna, Prague, the bridge into Hungary, an island on the Danube that now lies under water, Plovdiv and Istanbul. Many pins are approximate: the sources name a town, not the exact spot where he stood.
Tolstoy's huge novel carries its aristocratic families from the drawing rooms of 1805 into the wars against Napoleon, and its battlefields are among the most famous in fiction: a forgotten battery, a wounded prince staring at the sky, a civilian in a white hat on the wrong hill at the right moment. The route follows the book from a Moscow house and a country estate through Schöngrabern and Austerlitz to 1812: Borodino, the council at Fili and Napoleon waiting on Poklonnaya Hill. Some stops are real places Tolstoy wrote about, others are real stand-ins for places that exist only in the novel; each says which. Dates follow the modern calendar, with Tolstoy's Old Style date noted where it differs.
Huck Finn fakes his own murder and, with Jim, who has run away from slavery, takes a raft down the Mississippi. Their goal is Cairo, where Jim would be a free man the minute he saw it. They miss it in the fog and drift on into slave country, past a feud, two con men and a farm with the book's last twist. Twain built St. Petersburg from his boyhood town of Hannibal. Most places in the novel are invented, so each pin marks a real landmark or stand-in, and the Grangerfords' country and Bricksville stay off the map.
A man known as the Professor recruits eight robbers named after cities, puts them in red jumpsuits and Salvador Dalí masks, and sends them into the Royal Mint of Spain. Two heists later, the target is the Bank of Spain. Neither building is what it seems: the Mint is the headquarters of Spain's national research council, and the bank is a government ministry. The route follows the Madrid places where the series was filmed, in story order, from a farm estate in Torrelodones to a staircase in the Casino de Madrid.
Downton Abbey is set on a fictional Yorkshire estate between 1912 and 1925, but its great house stands in Hampshire and its village in Oxfordshire. This route follows the story, from the Titanic news of series 1 to the royal visit of the 2019 film, to the real places behind it. It takes in Highclere Castle, Bampton's church and library, a prison in Lincoln, castles in Scotland and Northumberland, the Ealing stage where the kitchen was built, and the film's parade village and York streets. Lacock's pin marks the village, as the sources name no exact spot.
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.
Walter Mitty manages photo negatives at Life magazine in New York and escapes his dull days in elaborate daydreams. When the negative chosen for the last print cover goes missing, he has to track down its photographer, Sean O'Connell — to Greenland, Iceland and the Himalayas. Ben Stiller's 2013 film was shot on analog film, and almost all of its adventure was shot in Iceland. This route starts at Life's real Manhattan home and then follows Walter through the Icelandic towns, harbour, mountain road, volcano and waterfall that stand in for Greenland and Afghanistan. The places are real; which country they play is not.
Jake Barnes, an American newspaperman wounded in the war, spends his Paris nights in the cafés of Montparnasse with Lady Brett Ashley — the woman he loves and cannot have. Then the whole crowd heads south: trout fishing in the Pyrenees, then a week of San Fermín in Pamplona, where drink, jealousy and a nineteen-year-old matador break everything open. Hemingway built the novel from his own trips of 1924 and 1925, and almost every stop can still be visited: the café on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, the inn at Burguete, the arcade café on Pamplona's main square, the bullring, the beach at San Sebastián and the Madrid restaurant where the book's last meal is eaten.
Walter White, an overqualified high school chemistry teacher with a part-time job at a car wash, learns he has stage-three lung cancer and starts cooking methamphetamine with a former student, Jesse Pinkman. Vince Gilligan's series ran on AMC from 2008 to 2013, 62 episodes in all, and unlike most shows it was both set and filmed in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The city's motels, diners and strip malls became as recognisable as the cast. This route visits seven places from the series and its film sequel, El Camino. Almost all of them are working businesses. The White and Pinkman houses are people's real homes and are deliberately left off the map.
Peter Jackson shot all three Lord of the Rings films at once, in 438 days between October 1999 and December 2000, at more than 150 locations across New Zealand's North and South Islands. Farmland became the Shire, a regional park became Rivendell, a lonely hill in Canterbury became the capital of Rohan, and a volcano in Tongariro National Park stood in for Mount Doom. This route follows Frodo's story through eight of those places, most of them easy to visit. Some sets were rebuilt for visitors; others were removed and the land returned to how it was. The mountains of Tongariro are sacred to local Māori, so please admire the summits from below.
Florence, 1476: young Ezio Auditore watches his father and brothers hanged on false charges, and spends the next quarter-century hunting the men responsible across Tuscany, Romagna and Venice, all the way to the Vatican. Ubisoft's 2009 game rebuilt Renaissance Italy for climbing and running across rooftops, and mixed its invented feud between Assassins and Templars with real people — the Medici and Pazzi, Leonardo da Vinci, Caterina Sforza and the Borgia pope. The route visits the real buildings and towns of the game. The Auditore family and their villa are fictional; most of the events around them are invented or rearranged from history.