London —
Walking down a London street populated by chic wine bars, Michelin-starred restaurants and smart, Victorian buildings, a group of tourists suddenly halts in its tracks.
They’re ignoring the appealing surroundings. Instead, they’re peering through an iron gate leading to a far-less-appealing alleyway where a row of garbage cans flanks a fire escape staircase, leading into a brick building.
“That’s it,” says one visitor to another. “That’s Slough House.”
In unison, the group gets out their phones, grinning ear to ear. Someone cheers.
Tour guide Susannah Cohen laughs: “Welcome to the only tour of London where people cheer when they see a dustbin.”
Slough House, for the uninitiated, is the fictional setting for Apple TV’s “Slow Horses,” the Emmy-award-winning adaptation of Mick Herron’s comedic spy book series of the same name. The UK-based show concluded its sixth season this week (viewers who aren’t up to date — don’t worry, there are no major season six spoilers in this article).
“Slow Horses” depicts a group of down-on-their-luck British spies — including rumored-new-James-Bond Jack Lowden as River Cartwright. They’ve been relegated from the glamor of MI5 to a grimy, permanently-gray-tinged office in northeast London, near the city’s Barbican Estate and Arts Centre.
The outcasts are presided over by Gary Oldman in a career-best performance as Jackson Lamb — a man who looks like he hasn’t washed since his Cold War-era spy heyday. But despite their ineptitude, the “Slow Horses” team save the day, time and time again.
The show’s genre-bending mix of comedy, thriller and very British drama has been a recipe for global success — and put a series of unlikely London locations on the tourist map.
“It’s a show that’s really about London and what London’s really like — which is incredibly layered and contrasting and conflicting,” “Slow Horses” director Adam Randall tells CNN Travel. “The locations are such a massive part of the show for us.”
‘Contrasting and conflicting’
When London’s on screen on an international scale, it’s usually via Richard-Curtis-esque tree-lined streets, multi-million-dollar townhouses and improbably chocolate-box snowy scenes.
“Slow Horses,” meanwhile, leans into London’s grimier, grittier side — though some of this grime and grit is enhanced for effect. Tour guide Cohen says she always knows when Apple’s about to start filming because “a big pile of rubbish appears outside the office building.”
Cohen runs organized, twice-weekly, often sold out, walking tours of “Slow Horses” City of London locations.
“Three years ago I did this tour for the first time for a friend whose boyfriend was a big fan. It was a Christmas present,” Cohen tells CNN Travel.
Since then, she’s spotlighted Slough House 120 times and counting — to paying customers from far and wide.
“What makes me really happy is that people from all over the world love this show,” Cohen says. “They’re off the plane from California, where it’s sunny and beautiful, and I literally take them in the gray to look at dustbins. And every time we see a location, they’re so happy.”
In Mick Herron’s novels, he pinpoints the exact location of the Slough House office — Aldersgate Street, near Barbican tube station. Herron had a spot in mind while writing, and his descriptions conjure a specific air of downtrodden workplace mundanity.
In an act of unusually specific loyalty to the source material, Apple’s television adaptation films the exterior of Slough House at pretty much the exact spot described by Herron. The office is on the corner of Aldersgate Street and Carthusian Street, above Vecchio Parioli Italian restaurant — the facade of which remains unchanged in the show. On screen, Jackson Lamb has been spotted slurping spaghetti in the Italian eatery.
In reality, Aldersgate Street is a pleasant area. While it lacks the polish of Mayfair, the City of London has its own appeal, mixing historic architecture with modern towers, backdropped by the dark, imposing Brutalism of the Barbican.
“It’s a show that’s really about London and what London’s really like — which is incredibly layered and contrasting and conflicting”
“Slow Horses” director Adam Randall
A couple of the businesses underneath the office undergo on-screen makeunders or transformations. A local cafe, Gate Grill, becomes Jackson Lamb’s favorite Chinese restaurant. A newsagent gets a less colorful awning. And the aforementioned trash bags appear on the street.
Vecchio Parioli retaining its name and green fronting makes the location easy for fans to track down. The best view is looking down from the Barbican’s elevated White Lyon Court, part of the Barbican Highwalk. That’s where Cohen takes her sightseers, before guiding them to street level via the Barbican Bridge — which also features in the show in season three — for further photo opportunities.
It’s impossible, says “Slow Horses” director Randall — who helmed seasons four and six and is currently working on season eight — to avoid onlookers when filming outside Slough House.
“From the Barbican, everyone can watch from above,” he says, joking that it can’t be that interesting because that location is only ever really used for the same shot — “a Slow Horse, walking down the street.”
As the show’s popularity grows, so do the crowds. While fans are usually respectful — Randall was relieved a returning favorite in season six was kept under wraps — recent social media leaks from season eight filming in Walthamstow, East London, inadvertently spoiled survival twists for characters left in peril in the latest season.
While the Slough House office’s exterior is on Aldersgate Street, the alleyway entrance which causes the delighted cheers from Cohen’s tour group is a couple of blocks away, on St. John Street — home to Michelin-starred restaurants Luca and St. John.
“Slow Horses” fan Suzanne Martin, originally from New Zealand and now living in Canada, tells CNN Travel she was surprised to learn “the locations are heavily manipulated to increase the grit level.” In the show, the alleyway becomes extra cluttered and extra grubby.
She signed up for Cohen’s tour while on vacation with her Canadian husband, Jeffrey Kearney. The couple love the show and figured it would be a fun morning activity to help conquer jet lag. Neither of them expected to see the alleyway appear out of nowhere on “a smart street … completely separate from their office.”
“It portrays the city as a lot darker and grittier than our experience,” adds Kearney.
Despite a disappointing lack of grime, Kearney and Martin enjoyed Cohen’s tour and meeting “interesting fellow ‘Slow Horses’ fans from Italy, America and varied parts of Britain.”
Cohen says the fans on her tour always bond over their shared love of the show — something she credits to the power of its characters and storytelling.
“When you put that in a tour situation, it’s like we all have friends in common because everyone is fond of the characters,” she says.
She thinks the show has a universality, despite its Britishisms.
“I think it captures how you get on with your work colleagues,” says Cohen. “And imposter syndrome — I think people can relate to that.”
Cohen fills her two-hour tour with “Slow Horses” quotes and tidbits, but she also weaves in other literature references, pop culture filming details and a wider historical context.
“It surprised me that there was such a rich London history at each location,” says vacationer Kearney. “It covered so many periods from William Blake to the Barbican’s brutalism to the Smithfield overnight meat market in a square mile of the city.”
William Blake comes into play at Bunhill Fields — a graveyard near Old Street station that’s the resting place of the Romantic poet. The graveyard appears in season one and season six when Jackson Lamb declares “Blake’s Grave” — surreptitiously summoning the team there to tell them they need to vanish underground.
Showing her tour participants around the graveyard on an overcast October day, Cohen points out that the tomb used as Blake’s grave isn’t his real headstone. Filmmakers also add in polystyrene graves among the actual tombstones. But the location is still recognizable from the show— an atmospherically moody spot in the damp weather.
“This is the only tour I do where people are glad when it rains,” says Cohen, entirely seriously.
“This is the only tour I do where people are glad when it rains.”
Susannah Cohen, “Slow Horses” location tour guide
Cohen’s tour also takes in the Barbican Laundry — a real-life launderette that looks unchanged since 1973 and features multiple times on the show.
Outside the launderette, fans on Cohen’s tour recreate a publicity shot of Oldman as Lamb answering a phone call. Another photo op comes outside St. Michael’s Cornhill in the City of London, which doubles up as St. Leonard’s in the show, a secret MI5 memorial church.
There are so many locations in “Slow Horses” — and new ones get added with each season — that Cohen has to be selective. She limits herself to a walkable radius, but fans doing their own pilgrimage often head north to Regent’s Canal to hunt out the bench where Lamb and MI5 chief Diana Taverner, played by Kristin Scott Thomas, meet to share confidential intel.
American fan Jason Reynolds regularly visits London and incorporates “Slow Horses” sleuthing into his itinerary. It took him a few visits, but he was delighted when he pinpointed the exact Regent’s Canal bench. On his most recent visit to London, Reynolds also poked his head into the Gate Grill cafe, the location of Lamb’s favorite Chinese restaurant.
“As we were looking at it trying to work that detail out, a staff member stopped and said it was indeed the spot,” Reynolds tells CNN Travel. “So, we popped in for a beverage and to eat, looked at the book of pictures they had of filming, and of course I had to sit in Jackson’s spot.”
The only disappointment, Reynolds says, is that the MI5 headquarters depicted in the show doesn’t exist in real life. Part of the building is the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, and the rest is CGI-ed in.
While the show does engage in some such creative license, director Randall says the team tries and keeps locations as geographically accurate as possible. While they occasionally make exceptions, a character won’t generally walk around the corner and suddenly be in a totally different part of London.
“We try not to cheat,” Randall says. “On the whole, we really try and make it so that if you know the city, it makes sense.”
While “Slow Horses” is known for its grungier and grubbier locations, occasionally the show embraces what Randall calls the “more expensive, luxurious London.”
In season six, buzzy restaurant The Dover in Mayfair forms the backdrop to one scene, with owner Martin Kuczmarski writing on Instagram that it was an “honor” to be a small part of the show.
Meanwhile, the season six finale includes a climactic scene at restaurant Quaglino’s, a London Mayfair institution dating back to the 1920s. And viewers occasionally get a glimpse inside the swanky homes of crooked politicians and MI5 bigwigs — including Taverner.
Randall is very involved in picking locations when he’s directing, but he says the experience of location scouting for “Slow Horses” has changed over the years.
“I’ve looked in so many hotels, so many suites, so many restaurants … When I was first looking at locations, a lot of people didn’t know what I was talking about when I said, ‘I’m on ‘Slow Horses,’” he recalls. “Whereas now there’s just so much goodwill. A lot of the boroughs in London really want us to be there, because they’re fans of the show and they’re fans of how we depict London.”
Recent episodes see some of the characters, including Jack Lowden’s River Cartwright, spending time outside of London — driving down motorways, averting assassins by ducking into Go Bowling, a real bowling alley in the town of Dunstable northwest of London, and Beaconsfield Services, a highway rest stop farther west.
For Randall he says it’s a fun challenge to take “pedestrian, uncinematic spaces” and “put in big action sequences and chases and suspense sequences.”
“I love these strange sorts of spots that you find just outside of the cities, service stations, like these bowling alleys in the sort of middle of nowhere or the endless fields and farmland,” says Randall.
A season six episode includes a scene set in a branch of burger chain Shake Shack in the Camden district of London.
“That scene was written in an industrial wasteland,” recalls Randall. “But we’ve seen that in so many films. And why are they even there? Why would Lamb go to an industrial wasteland?”
Randall happened to be outside a fast-food restaurant as he was thinking through these questions. The cogs started whirring.
“We looked at loads of chicken shops. Then, Shake Shack just looked so cinematic, and that it was just in such a perfect position in Camden.”
The team then plotted out the rest of the scene, realizing the preceding scene needed to take place in Camden: “We pointed to a flat, and we said, ‘We’ve got to get a shot from there looking out,” says Randall. “It all kind of works that way, and it all feeds into the script.”
Randall mapped out a similarly effective location swap while working on the show’s season four finale, which was originally set on London’s riverside Embankment area. In the original scripts, Randall says River Cartright was thrown into the River Thames.
“I remember going to Embankment and looking around, going, ‘I don’t quite know about this,” he says.
While thinking through his uncertainties, Randall found himself in King’s Cross — specifically, the Lighterman, a pub in the Granary Square retail area. He was immediately struck by its cinematic potential, and rang then-head-writer Will Smith to pitch a new setting for the action.
The result was an extended sequence filmed in the nearby St. Pancras station — the departure and arrival point of Eurostar trains to Paris — and a decisive showdown in the floor-to-ceiling-glass-windowed Lighterman.
“We built that sequence out of the location,” says Randall. “It still was true to what was happening in the book in terms of the relationship and the dynamic. But the actual sequence came from that.”
A cheer-inducing season six sequence in an airfield was also rewritten and reworked after the original location fell through — something that’s not uncommon in long shoots.
“That airfield sequence… it was really good, but I always had a nagging feeling like ‘Is it as good as it could be?’” recalls Randall.
When the team were forced to find a new space, crew and cast reworked the scene to capture the magic that appears on screen.
While these moments can be stressful, Randall says they’re also some of the most exciting.
“So much of the spontaneity and creativity comes from the challenges that location shooting brings,” he says.
Season seven of “Slow Horses” is already in the can and right now, Randall and his team are hard at work filming season eight. Without giving anything away, Randall says to expect a few scenes in the city of Oxford.
“It’s just a completely different texture and a different feel for this show,” he says. “You’re in grimy East London and then you’re suddenly in Oxford University, so it’s got a really different take.”
But rest assured, the grime that’s attracting tourists from across the globe to Cohen’s tour isn’t going anywhere.
“There’s some really good central London stuff that’s a dream to shoot in,” says Randall.
As a Londoner, Randall says he feels “weirdly proud” to showcase ordinary “pub culture and busy London streets” and what he refers to as the city’s “slightly controlled mayhem.”
The show also depicts London office culture — the stakes might be high but there are still trips to grocery store Tesco to buy potato chips and caterpillar-shaped cake for workplace parties, ducking into pubs for post-work pints and stopovers at highway rest stops (albeit with potentially grizzly ends).
Randall suggests this is a “really nice counterpoint” to the postcard portrayals of London and the UK in movies like “Paddington” and the James Bond series. And that’s what appeals to the audience.
American fan Reynolds says while he enjoys the high-stakes spy drama, there’s an appeal of seeing a more “real” London on film.
“While we are all used to the more glitzy side being in so many films and television shows, there is the ‘other side,’” he says. “The rain, the dark streets, the noise, the industrial lots, the dodgy areas. People and their ‘real life’ rather than a manufactured version.”
