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GamesApproximate

Watch Dogs: Legion: Hacking Near-Future London

Watch Dogs: Legion is set in a fictionalised near-future London, and its story runs through the Palace of Westminster, New Scotland Yard, The Shard (renamed the Nexus Tower), Nine Elms and the Tower of London. The hacker group DedSec fights a surveillance state built by the private military company Albion. This route follows the story from the bomb plot at Parliament to the showdown at the Tower. The game remakes London, so pins mark real landmarks and districts, not in-game buildings.

5 locations2/5 visitable

HistoryApproximate

Richard III: Middleham to Leicester

Richard III's story runs from Middleham Castle in Yorkshire to Bosworth Field, where he died in 1485, and on to Leicester, where his grave was found under a car park in 2012. The route follows his childhood at Middleham, the battle of Tewkesbury, the princes at the Tower of London, his last charge at Bosworth, and the Greyfriars dig and cathedral tomb in Leicester. The exact Bosworth battlefield is still debated.

6 locations5/6 visitable

GamesFictional

Detroit: Become Human: The Real Detroit

Detroit: Become Human is set in a near-future Detroit, 2038, where androids work and revolt among real landmarks like the Spirit of Detroit, the Monument to Joe Louis and Belle Isle. The route follows six places where the game meets the real city, from downtown sculptures and Eastern Market murals to the suburb of Ferndale, the Packard plant and Belle Isle. The game is an approximation, not a recreation, so several stops are marked approximate or fictional.

6 locations4/6 visitable

MoviesApproximate

Interstellar: Iceland's Glaciers and Alberta's Farms

Interstellar's dust-choked farms were filmed in Alberta, at Longview, Okotoks and Fort Macleod, and its ice and water planets in Iceland, at Svínafellsjökull and the Eldhraun lava field. The secret NASA base is the lobby of Los Angeles's Westin Bonaventure Hotel. The route follows Cooper's story in order, from the school and the baseball field through the dust storm and the hidden base to the two alien worlds. Some locations are approximate where the guides do not give an exact spot.

7 locations0/7 visitable

MoviesApproximate

Out of Africa: Karen Blixen's Kenya

Out of Africa was filmed around Nairobi and the Ngong Hills in Kenya, with the Danish scenes shot at Castle Rising in Norfolk, England. Sydney Pollack's 1985 film, based on Karen Blixen's memoir, uses the Muthaiga Country Club, the coffee farm that is now the Karen Blixen Museum and the Chyulu Hills standing in for the Ngong Hills. This route follows Blixen's years in Kenya and the places the film made famous: the railway museum whose locomotive pulls the opening train, the club where Farah is turned away, the farm at the foot of the Ngong Hills, the Norfolk castle that plays Denmark, Voi Airport where Denys Finch Hatton's plane went down, and the obelisk grave on the hillside above Nairobi.

8 locations6/8 visitable

GamesFictional

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided: Dubai, Prague and London

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided opens in a half-built Dubai hotel, moves to a near-future Prague, and ends at a London summit. The game's city is a fiction: Prague is compressed into three invented districts, while Dubai's hotel and London's Apex Centre do not exist. But each stop stands on a real place, and this route follows the story from Dubai to the Vltava and the Thames, using the real cities, the real model for Golem City and the real Alpine range as anchors. The six stops follow the main mission order, from the Dubai prologue through Prague, Golem City and the Swiss Alps to the London finale.

6 locations6/6 visitable

HistorySpeculative

Genghis Khan: From the Onon to Samarkand

The boy born on the Onon River became the ruler of the largest land empire in history. This route follows him from the steppe camps of Khentii, through the war that began at a border town in Kazakhstan, to the siege of Samarkand and a death in the middle of a campaign. The sources disagree on his birth year, his birthplace and his grave. Where the Secret History of the Mongols gives a legend and other sources give the record, the stops say which is which.

8 locations6/8 visitable

MoviesFictional

Neon Genesis Evangelion: Hakone as Tokyo-3

Tokyo-3 is the fortress city of Neon Genesis Evangelion, home of NERV and the battleground against its monstrous enemies. It is fictional, but the series places it on the north shore of Lake Ashi near Sengokuhara, in Hakone, and the town has leaned into the connection ever since. The route follows five real places where the series' scenes and stand-ins meet Hakone, from the Sengokuhara plain to the lake where Tokyo-3 drowns. The city never existed, so each pin marks a real stand-in.

5 locations5/5 visitable

MoviesApproximate

Midnight in Paris: Gil's Paris, Then and Now

Gil Pender is a screenwriter with a nostalgia problem, in Paris with a fiancée and her wealthy parents. Every night at midnight a 1920s car pulls up and carries him back to the 1920s, among the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway and the surrealists. By day he is stuck in 2010. This route follows the film from Monet's garden at Giverny to Pont Alexandre III, with the stops placed from a film-locations guide: where the 1920s scenes are shot you can still sit, eat and shop today. The party and flea-market scenes are approximate.

9 locations8/9 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

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

MythologySpeculative

Aeneas: From Troy to Latium

Troy has fallen. Aeneas, a Trojan prince, carries his old father out of the burning city and sets sail with the survivors to find the new homeland the gods have promised them. Virgil's Aeneid, written for Augustus in the 20s BC, follows years of wrong turns, storms and prophecies until the exiles land in Italy, where their descendants will one day found Rome. This route follows the voyage in the order it happens, which is not the order Virgil tells it: the poem opens in Carthage and lets Aeneas recount the earlier wanderings to Queen Dido. Every stop is a real ancient site, most now open as archaeological parks; Aeneas himself belongs to legend. Quotations are from John Dryden's 1697 translation.

9 locations8/9 visitable

BooksApproximate

Americanah: Lagos, America, Lagos Again

Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love at secondary school in Lagos, in a Nigeria under military rule where everyone seems to be planning to leave. She gets a scholarship to Philadelphia; he, refused an American visa after 9/11, ends up working illegally in London. Over thirteen years in the United States Ifemelu discovers that she has become "black" — and writes a hit blog about it — before deciding to go home. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 2013 novel moves between real cities on three continents, and the route follows it in story order rather than in the book's flashback structure. Homes, salons and the university in Philadelphia are not identified, so most pins mark the city or campus.

9 locations1/9 visitable

MoviesExact

Before Sunrise: One Night in Vienna

On 16 June 1994 an American, Jesse, and a French student, Céline, meet on a train from Budapest. He talks her into getting off with him in Vienna, and with no money for a hotel they walk the city all night, talking about love, death and everything else until his flight leaves in the morning. Richard Linklater's 1995 film was shot entirely in Vienna and began a trilogy that continued in Before Sunset and Before Midnight. The film strings its locations together as if they were a single walk; in reality they are scattered across the city, from the outer districts to the Danube. This route visits them in the order of the night.

9 locations9/9 visitable