Stars of Gentleman Jack are back filming on streets of historic city
SCENES FROM the second series of Gentleman Jack have been filmed in York.
The cast and crew were seen at locations in the precincts of York Minster, Fairfax House, College Green and the Castlegate area, and Suranne Jones, who plays Anne Lister, was spotted in costume on the set today.
Fairfax House, a Georgian merchant’s house on Castlegate, was once a gentlemen’s club and has been owned by the York Civic Trust, which has operated it as a museum since the 1980s. It featured in the first series of Gentleman Jack as the interior of Lister’s former lover Vere Cameron’s London home.
St William’s College – which was formerly a lodging house for trainee priests and dates back to the 15th century – was transformed into the milliner’s shop of hatmaker Miss Wilks,
and crew members could be seen replacing the sign above the building with a 19th- century replica.
The college has had several prominent owners during its history – after the Church
originally sold it, it was used by a residence by the Howard family, the Earls of Carlisle, while Castle Howard was being built, and later by the Lane Fox family, the Lords Bingley, whose main seat is at Bramham Park.
It was restored and sold back to the Church in 1912. Since then, it has been used as a conference and banqueting space by the Minster, but there are plans to convert it into offices, meeting rooms and a cafe.
Street scenes for the first series of Gentleman Jack were also filmed in York, and buildings including Grays Court Hotel and Holy Trinity Church, on Goodramgate. Anne Lister had close connections to York. She was sent to board at a girls’ school in King’s Manor, the former seat of the Council of the North that is now occupied by the University of York.
The second series of Gentleman Jack examines the period after Anne Lister and her same- sex partner and fellow heiress Ann Walker begin living together as a couple at Shibden, her ancestral home.