Our pick of the best films set in London, from Notting Hill to Sliding Doors
Today will mark 25 years since the release of Notting Hill, Richard Curtis’s rom-com about cool American actress Anna Scott (Julia Roberts) falling in love with awkward English bookshop owner Will Thacker (Hugh Grant).
The cult romance did not only bring us “Whoopsidaisies!” and “I'm also just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her” (a sentence which has lost none of its cringe factor), but it put London’s Notting Hill on the map, making it a tourist destination spot forever more.
The capital has long served as a backdrop, a catalyst, often almost another character, for filmmakers – they just can’t get enough.
To celebrate a quarter of a century since the release of Notting Hill, here are some of our favourite London movies, listed in no particular order.
Passport to Pimlico, 1949
A small part of London becoming, technically, foreign territory was the plotline for this golden age Ealing comedy. Too silly to ever happen in real life, you’d think – until the bureaucracy around Brexit seemed to momentarily suggest Kent would get its own border. Released
