Don’t tell Paddington fans about the London traffic

PADDINGTON 2 is up for the Peter Sellers Award for Comedy at the London Evening Standard British

Film Awards tomorrow — and Outstanding British Film at The Baftas later in the month. It’s also been doing great business on behalf of London around the world. The film has opened now almost everywhere, from Indonesia to Mexico, from Taiwan to darkest Peru (last week). The current worldwide box office gross stands at about £140 million.

Many of those who have been enjoying it will never have been to London, any more than Paddington’s Uncle Pastuzo, he who fondly supposes that here “the rivers run with marmalade and the streets are paved with bread”. So just what idea of the city will such audiences, adults or children, be forming?

In many ways, quite a sound and detailed one actually, since much of it was filmed in real settings, including such places as Camden Lock, Clerkenwell Green, Portobello Road, Paddington Station and the Royal Victoria Docks, as well as at international landmarks such as St Paul’s Cathedral and the Shard. It looks surprisingly contemporary too, displaying the city’s glittering, speared skyline, as it is now. Not to mention being spot-on about London’s diversity.

So, CGI-bear notwithstanding, global audiences may well think that what they’re seeing is pretty much what London is like. Making the city alluring has always been the intention of the producer David Heyman, who said at the time of the first film: “Paddington is a love letter to

London. All too often London is filmed in a grey way, perhaps due to the rainy days. It’s very rare that you see London as beautiful as it really is.”

Lovely! But also deceptive. One big swiz is pretty obvious. The Brown family live in a handsome and spacious terraced house, the perfectly recognisable Chalcot Crescent in Primrose Hill once more standing in for “Windsor Gardens”, as though this were fairly normal circs for any London family. Zoopla reports that the current average value of one of the terraced houses in this crescent is £3,862,515. So there’s that.

Watching the film again this week, another unreality struck me much more forcibly. For although there are modern cars in Paddington, there are wonderfully few of them. There are just one or two, neatly parked in the whole length of a street. There’s no traffic. It’s completely safe to cycle. Even the pavements are empty. London looks so easy to get around, so open, so clear. It’s a dream.

Or to put it another way, it’s an even bigger fib than pretending that Londoners all live in fine houses. Some fortunates do. But nobody escapes the traffic. In fact, a new survey has revealed that Britain has the worst congestion in Western Europe — and in London the average driver loses 74 hours and £2,430 in peak-time jams. No amount of marmalade is going to help with that, Paddington fans will find, if they ever come here on pilgrimage.