Apple TV+’s Slow Horses is a bonafide word-of-mouth hit. The show, which follows the exploits of Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb and his group of disgraced MI5 agents as they foil plots around London, has garnered awards, millions of viewers and a devoted fan following.
Now, with season four on the horizon, hype around the show has never been so high – but one star character that is often overlooked is London itself.
Location Manager Ian Pollington has been involved with the show for four and a half years, working with a team to scope out the perfect locations to film, from Tower Hamlets all the way to the Langham Hotel. And though the show has seen its fair amount of fireworks in previous seasons, “season 4 has been quite challenging” to film, says Pollington.
Here’s how it was put together.
Where do the team film?
The team often film around London, in the places brought to life in the Mick Herron books upon which it is based.
“We are on the fringes of London, we’re in Islington and Tower Hamlets,” says Pollington. “We always try to be best in class. We’re a big unit, we’re the size of a movie out on the street every day.”
These days, he says, the team have a very collaborative relationship with housing agencies and estates across London – to the extent that they were able to access whole new areas when it came to filming season four.
“We've got access to locations that we wouldn't have necessarily have gained access to without that [love of the show] which has been amazing,” he says. Like what?
“On two or three occasions when we've been shooting in Central London, in particularly Marylebone, that's led to access into buildings, that we wouldn't have ordinarily.”
Favourite locations to film
Pollington says a few locations for season four in particular stand out for him.
“We brought Christmas to Granary Square in the middle of the summer. Part of the sequence involves Granary Square, it involves St Pancras Station, and lots of different agencies were involved,” he says.
Season four also offers a few big set pieces. “We had an exploding bomb, we had grenades going into a canal, there’s a car crash with a dustbin lorry and we’ve got a car bomb in a shopping centre, which when you look at that on the page, you think, ‘Christ, how we are we going to achieve that?’”
In case you were wondering, that ended up being filmed at West Herts College in Hertfordshire.
Where is Slough House?
Mick Herron’s books have always been very clear about where Slough House is located, says Pollington.
“It’s in the writing. I mean that particular Slough House location being on Aldersgate Street, above a Chinese restaurant.”
But filming there was another matter. “It was literally our first starting point. We looked at that location and thought, ‘this isn’t really practical’ – it’s on a busy junction, it’s on a road, you’ve got the station pouring out, there are references in the book to the school kids in the locality from Italia Conti at the bus stop.”
Though the team looked at other places, they eventually came back to Aldersgate Street. “We looked at other places, we looked further down, into Hackney and Tower Hamlets, but actually we came back after engaging with the local community, with the Barbican Estate, we made that decision to enable road closures and control at weekends when we needed to have that. We made that decision to be true to the book and shoot on location.”
Is it all filmed in London?
Mostly, yes. “We've always tried to have our anchor [be Slough House], and just be true to the geography of the original writing,” says Pollington. Generally, that means not making long journeys in the car – and when they do, filming those journeys in London.
“I think it would be easy to just put them on a low loader and stick them off out on the A13 and say well they're in the car and that's fine. It’s not so easy to put them in a car on the Old Street roundabout and drive them through London. But it's worth doing and it's worth it [for viewers to] say actually that all sort of makes sense because I live in Central London and there's logic to it. We haven’t sort of taken the easy way out.”
And what do the real spooks think about the show?
“Positive things,” he says coyly. “Secondhand, but actually positive about the show.” Colour us intrigued.
