Style & Culture

Four Weddings and a Funeral filming locations you can visit

It was the film that launched Hugh Grant's career – and Elizabeth Hurley's – and put Wet Wet Wet at the top of the charts for 15 weeks. In 2019 its cast were reunited for a short sequel in aid of Comic Relief. Twenty-five years after its release, we raise a toast to Richard Curtis's rom-com hit with a look at its real-life locations
Four Weddings and a Funeral filming locations you can visit
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The return of Charles, Carrie, Duckface and the rest of the gang for Red Nose Day 2019 is a reminder of the sheer endurance of Four Weddings and a Funeral – floppy hair, casual smoking, ‘Love Is All Around’ and all. Though it’s Hugh Grant’s show – his stammering, head-butting, posh-scruff bachelor still charms 25 years on – it’s packed with characters and performances that have come to define British film from stars including Kristin Scott Thomas, Anna Chancellor, John Hannah and James Fleet.

  • Writer Richard Curtis was already known for Blackadder hence the presence of Rowan Atkinson as Four Weddings...
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    Writer Richard Curtis was already known for Blackadder – hence the presence of Rowan Atkinson as Four Wedding’s spoonerising vicar – but that didn’t mean the film that was almost called Toffs on Heat was given the budget to fulfill the script’s tour of the churches and country houses of the UK. Efficiency was all, so Somerset and Scotland alike were recreated in counties a day trip from London, relying on England’s fondness for building churches and stately homes.

    We first meet the chaps at Angus and Laura’s knot-tying, supposedly in Stoke Clandon, Somerset. In fact it’s at St Michael’s, a Victorian-remodelled Norman church in the Surrey village of Betchworth, that we see best man Charles, after much fity-fing, forget the rings. After this, the team repair through a hastily installed farmyard to the reception, which was staged in a marquee in the grounds of private house Goldingtons, a 30-room Georgian mansion in the village of Sarratt, on the north-western outskirts of London.

  • From here, Charles takes a chance and follows beguiling American beauty Carrie (Andie MacDowell) to The Lucky Boatman inn. For this, the production filmed at two pubs, both on the High Street in Amersham, Buckinghamshire. The black-and-white Tudor exterior is the King’s Arms,(pictured) but once we’re inside it’s the Crown Hotel, still doing good business on the back of the bedroom scene – ask for Room 101 if you want the four-poster, unchanged despite recent refurbishment.

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    The next nuptials are, according to the stiff invitation, at St Mary of the Fields, Cripplegate. This time we’re in the chapel of the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, south London, (pictured) familiar from a host of movies including The Madness of King George (1994), Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011) and Les Misérables (2012).

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    We then retire to Luton Hoo Estate in Luton (pictured), a 1767 Robert Adam-designed stately home that has since been converted into a hotel. Charles’s unintentional presence at happy couple Bernard and Lydia’s consummation in one of the rooms is nothing for a house featured in Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 orgy-fest Eyes Wide Shut.

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    Wedding number three, Carrie’s, is supposed to be in Perthshire but was filmed in Surrey. The ceremony is in St Peter and St Paul’s Church, Albury, (pictured) part of a Grade II listed mansion that has since been turned into apartments – we see the building as they leave the church. The reception at the fictional Glenthrist Castle was filmed inside the spectacular Rotherfield Park, near Alton in Hampshire. This 1815 castle is an eccentric collation of parapets, towers and follies; though privately owned, its gardens are often opened to the public.

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    Next comes the funeral, with John Hannah’s fondly remembered recitation of WH Auden’s ‘Funeral Blues’. This takes place in the striking church of St Clement in West Thurrock, Essex, a pre-Norman building extensively rebuilt in the 17th century and now stranded in the midst of an industrial estate. We see the smoking Procter and Gamble plant behind as the mourners leave, and the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge over the Thames at Dartford as they make their way to the service.

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    For our fourth and final (at least until this year) wedding, we’re back in London, at St Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield (pictured). Founded in the 12th-century, this colonnaded Norman wonder has also graced Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), Shakespeare in Love (1998) and Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes (2009).

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    Then, with no reception this time, we repair to Charles’s flat, sited at 22 Highbury Terrace in north London, a glimpse of London on the verge of a house boom and Swinging Again, just as earlier we see Charles and Carrie have coffee in a branch of then-chic bistro chain Dome in Wellington Street, Covent Garden (now a branch of bistro chain Café Rouge). It’s from here that they move to the South Bank, where Charles is meeting his brother at the BFI (then the National Film Theatre) but runs to declare his love via allusion to The Partridge Family. Even more than Liz Hurley’s sensation-causing safety-pinned dress at the premiere, the emptiness of this now seething visitor hotspot pins Four Weddings to its time, a charming postcard from the recent past.

    'Comic Relief' will be screened on BBC One on Friday 15 March from 7pm

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