Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
LOCATIONS WITH ROYAL APPROVAL
It’s disconcerting to see the famous black gates and imposing front door of Buckingham Palace in what looks like a car park at the back of Elstree studios. It looks remarkably real and illustrates the lengths to which the show’s producers have gone to re-create this iconic royal residence. The set is surrounded by special green screens that allow technicians to add on the rest of the palace façade using clever computer graphics.
Elizabeth’s bedroom suite has been created inside Elstree, but when other areas of the palace were needed for particular scenes they used various locations and stately homes. Lancaster House, with its sweeping staircase and sumptuous sitting room, is just a stone’s throw from the real palace and hosts all the big State Room scenes. Wilton House near Salisbury is used for the smaller palace rooms while Wrotham Park in Barnet stood in for the room where Elizabeth hosts her weekly audience with her prime minister. ‘Lancaster House is part of the Crown Estate and we had to submit a synopsis of the show,’ says location manager Pat Karam, who also won approval to close The Mall one Sunday morning to show Philip going up and down in his jaunty sports car (a scene
Matt Smith describes as his favourite). ‘They did check with the Palace and the response was “no objection” which is as close to an endorsement as you can get.’
Because it was still a time of post-war austerity the palace was made to look a little run down. ‘My team painted the sets for both Buckingham Palace and Downing Street – which was even more run down – to make them look like the wallpaper was peeling and there were water marks from damp,’ says Martin Childs, the production designer.
Most scenes depicting the family on overseas tours were filmed in South Africa; the famous Treetops Hotel in Kenya, where Elizabeth was staying when her father died, was re-created at a game reserve near Cape Town. But everything else was filmed in the UK. Each time the production moved venue, between 100 and 400 cast and crew moved with it. ‘That’s why I’m frequently asked if I can do Scotland nearer to London, and for the next series see if I can find a Suez Canal near London,’ says Pat. ‘But there’s nowhere near London that looks like the Cairngorms, so we filmed the exteriors of Balmoral at Ardverikie House near Inverness.’