Bridget Jones: Mad About Hampstead
HEREsay #1
This is HEREsay, an occasional series spotlighting a hidden detail or (in)famous locale, and exploring its place in the historical and literary imagination. This week it’s Hampstead and the Heath, as seen through the prism of the recently released Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy.
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild- “Ode to a Nightingale,” allegedly written by John Keats in or near the Spaniards Inn, a pub featured in the final Bridget Jones of the franchise
Rare, these or any days, is the mature rom-com. The one that causes swoons and titters while sparring with emotional complexities. The one that knows the “darkness” but also the “sweet.”
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is the most accomplished of the series while remaining satisfyingly reliant on its predecessors for levity and pathos (stick around for the credits for a refresher of all the film’s references). The movie opens like the first few minutes of Up!, world-building Bridget’s layered grief over the death of her husband, Mr. Darcy (Colin Firth). Then, it bursts forth—wild—from that anguish without ever abandoning it, bubbling with organic moments of humour and connection.
Director Michael Morris (13 Reasons Why, Better Call Saul) surprised me with how deftly he mingled the film’s competing tones. Often using camera tricks and edits to build or elide moods. In one sequence, we are shown Bridget wrestling with her mourning through the varied advice of friends and family without ever leaving her cloistered domestic surroundings. Dr. Rawlings (Emma Thompson) appears in the reflection of a hutch one moment, Jude (Shirley Henderson) at the nearby table the next, both seeming to occupy the same physical and psychic space.
Equally remarkable are the filming locations. Like Bridget herself, we are taken from elegant but stultifying safety to expansive naturalness. Stopping along the way at locales I’ve recently visited, including leafy, lovely Hampstead.
A Change of Address
Two kids mean bigger digs: a Victorian townhouse in fact. Bridget does her Bridget-best to raise her children in Hampstead, one of the oldest and most affluent areas in London. Director Michael Morris drew from his experience growing up in the residential community and Bridget Jones author Helen Fielding resides there in a Georgian townhouse. I did not come across Harry Styles on an electric bike when I recently explored the neighbourhood, but he’s also a resident, as are Rami Malek and Ricky Gervais. It’s no shock, then, that housing prices typically teeter between £2-10 million and are likely to continue skyward, given that Styles is planning to restore his former 18th-century mansion and combine two properties into one to the tune of £30 million.
Although interiors for Bridget’s townhouse were shot on a set at Sky Studios Elstree, the exterior is located near Flask Walk, a charming and very narrow residential street. The street ends in a cobblestone, pedestrian-only zone with shops and eateries featured in the film. For instance, a dinner date finds Bridget and Roxster in La Cage Imaginaire, a romantic brasserie serving French-Italian cuisine (has there ever been a more appetizing combo?).
Bridget’s children attend Galsworthy House School right around the bend from her home. However, Galsworthy House School is really Christ Church Primary School on Christchurch Hill. “Galsworthy” being a nod perhaps to novelist and playwright John Galsworthy (1867-1933) whose Grove Lodge has blue plaque status in Hampstead.
Everything feels safe in this vision of Hampstead. Mr. Wallaker (Chiwetel Ejiofor) shepherds students into classes with a whistle. Even the overgrown ivy is handsomely arranged.
Moving On Up (to the Heath)
When Bridget considers online dating—or rather, is bullied into it by her friend and colleague Miranda (Sarah Solemani)—we are brought to the liminal space of the Heath. Being an area of open uncultivated land, a heath is technically natural, home to common grasses and native wildflowers. But as a place for well-heeled city folk and day-trippers like me to meander and sit next to one of the bathing ponds, Hampstead Heath is also genteel, tame. I was handed binoculars by a volunteer to watch the local finches and parrots but the birds were cordoned off in their own sanctuary with provided feeders. Wild but protected.
London’s Heath is less than four miles from Central London and spans 790 acres. It sits on one of the highest points in London, affording visitors a panoramic view of the city centre from Parliament Hill (though I recommend the less obstructed view from Greenwich Park on the other side of the Thames). Unlike some other parks in the city, the Heath is free to wander 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Rain or shine, snow or snowdrops, friends of both the two-legged and four-legged variety can expend their energy swimming in the ponds (as long as the four-legged ones haven’t had a recent flea or tick treatment, that is).
The Heath has been with Londoners a long while, at least since it first appeared in history books in 1543 when its springs supplied city goers with fresh water and its land preserved game for King Henry VIII. In the midst of the pollution-choked 19th century, efforts were undertaken to preserve these “lungs of the metropolis.” Lord Mansfield’s Kenwood estate was handed over to the public in 1889 (read more about Kenwood House in my Gardens 101 piece and you can learn more about “Protecting Hampstead Heath” here). And the Heath had become home to sprawling fairs, as well as writers and artists stretching their legs before going on to extoll its virtues in print and paint.
In 1819, John Constable moved with his wife to Well Walk in Hampstead to ease her tuberculosis, and he took to painting scenes of the Heath that now can be visited at Tate Britain. Equally moved was C.S. Lewis. A snowy afternoon is said to have sparked Lewis’ imagination, inspiring him to write The Chronicles of Narnia, which features a land of perpetual winter due to the White Witch’s machinations. Perhaps he was further influenced by the mysteries of the Tumulus (which sounds a lot like Tumnus…just saying). The word “tumulus” refers to an ancient burial mound and it’s the name given to the small mound surrounded by a copse of trees along the footpath running between Well Walk and Merton Lane. Although excavations have found neither Queen Boadicea’s grave or that of some “British king before Christianity,” which is what William Stukeley included on an inscription in a 1725 painting, speculation still runs rampant. One local legend not yet debunked is that it contains the “dust of the slain” from some ancient tribal battle.
Not convinced? Satiate your desire for wonder by celebrating this year’s 75th anniversary of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe with tickets to the splashy play version at Sadler’s Well, which runs for a few weeks starting at the end of August 2025.
As for Bridget, the air does worlds of good for her and her children as they scamper about Parliament Hill. When I was there, three teenage friends played on a tree, one bouncing up and down on a long branch in ever more harrowing arcs. Ironic, since the Mad About the Boy crew went to great lengths not to harm what Morris calls the “really wonderful hearty oak tree” used when Bridget’s kids get stuck, prompting the harried mother to try (unsuccessfully) to rescue them. Low, fake branches were added to facilitate the clamouring and appease the Hampstead Park Service. A nod to that Park Service is made in the Hampstead Heath-branded uniform worn by Roxster (Leo Woodall) when he comes to Bridget’s aid.
Eventually, in my reality, the more sensible friend convinced the branch bouncer to disembark. Hopefully, not to go and disturb The Queen of the Woods, the famed beech tree hollowed out by a century of bacteria and fungi. A tree that proved so beloved by those squeezing themselves inside the trunk that it is now carefully distanced from admirers by a rope fence. (Learn about other Heath landmarks here.)
Pub Crawl
As Bridget opens up, the film opens up to the city. In a Time Out interview, director Michael Morris explains, “I wanted this Bridget movie to be a ‘real-life’ romcom, and for [the city] to look like the London that I know.”
Bridget once lived above a traditional British pub in Southwark, so it’s only fitting that pubs—the ‘public houses’ enjoyed by the hoi polloi and upper crust alike—feature prominently in the film. There’s the now-closed Hope & Anchor in Hammersmith where Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant) ignores his age-inappropriate girlfriend’s attempt at spoken word poetry. According to Morris, it “occasionally hosts really great-looking jazz nights” and “has a perfectly preserved vintage wood-panelled bar, straight out of the 1920s or 1930s.” There’s also The Old Queen’s Head on Essex Road in Islington, host to Bridget’s night out with the pals.
Although we don’t get a peak at the Globe Tavern below Bridget’s former Zone-1 (read: expensive) flat at 8 Bedale Street, we do visit what The Standard calls the once-“gritty” Borough Market. The same market used when Darcy and Daniel duke it out (ridiculously) in Bridget Jones’ Diary. There we get Bridget and Roxster’s first date in Mad About the Boy as they check out the now high-end food stalls beneath sweeping Victorian iron structures. Enjoying one another’s company before being whisked away via movie magic to the chic Electric Diner on Portobello Road clear across London for a bar scene with the love birds. Why this cinematic cheat? Morris explains, “I've always really liked the look of the Electric Diner—the barrel vaults are really visual and I wanted them to sit at the bar and have depth on both sides. But there is a really interesting little bar in Borough, The Sheaf, that has a vaulted structure, so I felt [the cheat] was okay.”
The pub I am most eager to visit brings us back to Hampstead, and it is steeped in history. The “discreetly stylish, authentically British” landmark pub The Spaniards Inn has “more than a few tales to tell” and “a romantic, nostalgic air” according to its website—all descriptors right up my alley. It began life in 1585 as a tollgate on the Finchley boundary and now offers a cozy fire when a chill descends and a walled beer garden when the temperature ticks up. You might even catch a glimpse of Juan Porero—his ghost anyway. The Spanish landlord, along with his brother Francesco, inspired the inn’s name and fought a duel over the woman they both loved (there are two dueling swords etched on the outside of the pub). Juan didn’t fare so well and was buried near the Inn. Close enough for his ghost to travel for a pint with Black Dick and Dick Turpin, two other spirits with a taste for the spirits. The first Dick was a moneylender who got trampled by a horse and carriage as it passed the pub. Apparently, his ghost likes to tug at guests’ sleeves when they’ve had too much of the sauce. The latter Dick was a highwayman who used the Inn—then under the charge of his father, the landlord—to hide from his pursuers by diving into an underground apartment through a trapdoor. Highwaymen, robbers on horseback who stole from unlucky travellers, were common in Britain between the 17th-18th centuries. Thankfully for future travellers, Dick Turpin’s crimes caught up to him and he was hanged. But he and his horse Black Bess have both been spotted by guests.
Less infamous but equally vivid in the British imagination is Romantic poet John Keats. He jotted down his “Ode to a Nightingale” there—or near there, depending on which historian you ask. And the Inn makes a quick appearance in Bram Stoker’s Dracula: “By good chance we got a cab near the ‘Spaniards,’ and drove to town,” writes Dr. Seward in his diary. In addition, Charles Dickens features The Spaniards Inn in The Pickwick Papers with his usual eye for satirical character portraits:
“In a couple of hours they all arrived safely in the Spaniards Tea-gardens, where the luckless Mr. Raddle’s very first act nearly occasioned his good lady a relapse; it being neither more nor less than to order tea for seven, whereas (as the ladies one and all remarked), what could have been easier than for Tommy to have drank out of anybody's cup--or everybody's, if that was all--when the waiter wasn't looking, which would have saved one head of tea, and the tea just as good!”
“Bridget Jones, it’s time to live.”
Bridget has farther to go and ever more wilder seeds to be sown in Mad About the Boy—from Moor House (120 London Wall) and the BBC’s White City Studios in Shepherd’s Bush where The Graham Norton Show is shot to the canal in hipster Hackney, all the way to a barn in the Lake District. Stately Petersham House, one of the shooting locations with a hard-to-find-in-London outdoor swimming pool, is even open to the public on April 13, 2025—my birthday of all days. But I will allow moviegoers to enjoy the rest of the journey for themselves.
And I hope that wherever you may be, you’re content, “Just as you are.”
Happy wanderings,
Mikey
