From Sherlock to Harry Potter, the City of London has found its way on to the silver and small screen many times. The architecture and famous landmarks are perfect settings for blossoming romances, dramatic showdowns or revelatory twist endings. Here are our five favourite choices for series and films set in London’s Square Mile.

1. St. Bart’s Hospital in Sherlock (2010–)
   Our favourite London detective is no stranger to the City. Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson have investigated cases that have taken them all across London, and the City has made a number of memorable appearances. In The Blind Banker they make their way up Tower 42, the third tallest skyscraper in London. The Old Bailey makes an appearance in The Reichenbach Fall. But no Sherlock list of London locations could be complete without St. Bart’s Hospital. It appears in the very first episode, A Study in Pink, as the research lab where Watson and Sherlock first meet. It then plays a starring role in The Reichenbach Fall when Sherlock seemingly jumps to his death. The wall starring in that very scene now has a series of tributes scrawled over it, all for that beloved and misanthropic detective.
2. Postman’s Park in Closer (2004)
   The gated park makes a brief but significant appearance in Closer, the film based on the Patrick Marber play featuring Jude Law, Natalie Portman, Clive Owen and Julia Roberts. After their dramatic meeting, Jude Law and Natalie Portman stroll through the park and look at the Memorial of Heroic Sacrifice. What is seemingly a brief scene at the beginning of a relationship turns into a major plot point in the film’s final moments.
3. Millennium Bridge in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)
   The boy who lived has made many appearances in the City. St Paul’s Cathedral was used for shots of the staircase leading to Divination class, the Leaky Cauldron is actually on Charing Cross Road and Leadenhall Market played the role of Diagon Alley. Most memorable, however, is the by Death Eaters’ total destruction of the iconic Millenium Bridge in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. It’s enough to make you feel a little uneasy every time you’re crossing over to the Tate.
4. Temple Church in The Da Vinci Code (2006)
   The late 12th-century church makes an appearance in the movie adaptation of Dan Brown’s bestseller when Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou search for clues in the English headquarters of the Knights Templar.

Tucked away near St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, Postman’s Park is one of the most interesting parks in the City of London, not least because of its strange and fascinating history …

The park began its life with death. It was a churchyard and burial site, for St. Botolph’s Aldersgate church. Cholera outbreaks in the 1830s and 1840s meant that the burial site became overcrowded, so much so that bodies were left on the ground and covered in soil instead of buried in the ground. Indeed, this explains the park’s elevation – but try not to think of that next time you climb the small steps into the park.

Thankfully the Burials Act was passed in 1851, preventing the emergence of new burials in built-up areas of London. In 1858 (a disconcertingly short period of time afterwards) Postman’s Park was opened to the public.

In 1818, the surrounding site was cleared for the General Post Office’s new Headquarters and Sorting Office. The park turned out to be an ideal lunchtime spot for the workers, giving it the name we’re still familiar with today.

In 1887, the painter and philanthropist George Frederic Watts wanted to mark Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee by commemorating the “heroic men and women” who died trying to save the lives of others. This idea would become the Doulton tablets, the Memorial to Heroic Self Sacrifice.

”The character of a nation as a people of great deeds is one, it appears to me, that should not be lost sight of,” Watts wrote in Another Jubilee Suggestion. “It must surely be a matter of regret when names worthy to be remembered and stories stimulating and instructive are allowed to be forgotten.”

He specifically drew attention to the case of Alice Ayres, a servant who instead of jumping to safety from a burning house, threw a mattress out the window and went back three times to save her employer’s children by throwing them out of the window onto the mattress. Overwhelmed by the fumes she fell out the window and died.

It is in wandering through this quiet park and reading the memorials that the park finds its unique and poetic quality. The park’s large flower beds and wide grass areas with thin curving paths make it an intimate yet open place. The addition of the memorials makes the experience humbling and contemplative. The memorials are mostly about death in fire, drowning and train accidents. The victims are young and are often killed saving children. It is strange to think of Elizabeth Boxall who died at the age of 17 while saving a child from a runaway horse in 1888. Or John Cambridge, a clerk in the London City Council, who died at 23 years old “saving the life of a stranger and a foreigner” from drowning in 1901.

There is now an app, The Everyday Heroes of Postman’s Park, which has more information on each of the people commemorated in the memorial. Next time you need a pause from the rush of the City or you’re taking your lunch break outside, walk through the park and consider its uniqueness and bizarre history.