They are easy to spot, hanging around on street corners, showing unusually close interest in their surroundings. Their clothing suggests hard experience of weather turning nasty. They take pictures. They consult notes. I know about such people. Sometimes, I am one of them.
I saw such a soul other day, loitering near the Barbican: staring long and hard at a wayfinder totem; looking Aldersgate Street up and down. Finding what I was looking for, I took out my phone, lined it up and snapped. I looked round, and he was at my side.
“Are you filming?” he asked.
No, just photos. Why did he ask?
“I was wondering,” he said, “because of Slow Horses. They’ve done some scenes round here.”
He looked at me a bit uncertainly. In his head, he was wondering, ‘does this bloke know what I’m on about?'”
This bloke did. In fact, he’d watched the latest episode the night before, and done so in his usual state of frustration and delight: frustration at being unable to identify the mews, alley or avenue in which scenes from the show had been filmed, even when they looked familiar; delight when he was able to. Sad, but true.
We agreed that the current series has been quite silly. “They’ve run out of ideas,” said my fellow seeker of locations. But we also agreed that, even so, the show captures qualities of London streets with empathy and skill. And, it so happened, we were adjacent to the building that serves as the Slow Horses’ HQ, the place where core characters from Mick Herron‘s novels most often act out their small screen lives.
My interlocutor left in search of other featured spots: a restaurant, a café. I turned back to my subject, a yellow-fronted 1950s tower block. Returning home, I did some research. Londonist informed me that A Slow Horses character had been filmed passing before it. I knew I’d seen it somewhere before.
John Vane’s London novel Frightgeist can be bought here.
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