Nearly three decades after Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman first played the cursed Owens sisters, the witches are back — and this time the coven has crossed the Atlantic. Practical Magic 2, directed by Susanne Bier and reuniting Kidman and Bullock, moves much of the story to southern England, following Sally's daughter Kylie (Joey King) as she heads to her family's ancestral homeland armed with the Book of the Raven. Maisie Williams, Xolo Maridueña and Lee Pace round out the new cast.
The production didn't just relocate the plot; it rebuilt the whole witchy world on British soil. Since the beloved Victorian Owens house from the 1998 film no longer exists — the original exterior stood on San Juan Island in Washington State — the team constructed a full replica from scratch on the back lot of Leavesden Studios in Hertfordshire. Production designer Tom Burton's team even matched the house's orientation to the sun so the light falls the way it did in the first film, and the greens crew planted more than 4,000 plants to recreate the famous garden. About half of the 55 shooting days happened at Leavesden.
Away from the studio, the sequel leans hard on genuinely atmospheric English locations. The village of Hambleden, west of London, plays the film's town of Thornfield, its brick-and-flint cottages and dormer windows doing much of the aesthetic heavy lifting. The Thornfield Inn is actually the Royal Standard of England in Beaconsfield — a pub in the Chiltern Hills that claims to be the oldest in Great Britain, with over 900 years of history, oysters, fish and chips, and Tuesday quiz nights.
Other stops include Langleybury Mansion in Hertfordshire (a Doubles for Harvard that has also appeared in Downton Abbey and The Crown), the private 2,700-acre Wormsley Estate in Buckinghamshire, and Black Park Country Park, whose conifer woods stand in for the forest around Thornfield. London itself gets in on the act: the Royal Hospital Chelsea, founded by Charles II in 1692, doubles as both a flower market and Harvard exteriors, while the Victorian Cromwell Buildings provide the home of Sally's new love interest, Professor Ian Wright (Lee Pace).
For travellers, this is a tidy real-world itinerary. Most of these spots are within easy reach of London — Hambleden, Beaconsfield and Black Park all sit in or near the Chiltern Hills, an under-hyped patch of countryside you can reach by train in under an hour. The Royal Standard of England is a proper working pub, so you can drink where the Owens women's fictional inn stands. Langleybury and Wormsley aren't generally open to casual visitors, but the surrounding villages, footpaths and country parks more than make up for it. Whether you're a Gen X fan of the original or Gen Z convert to the cult classic, a weekend of Chilterns pubs, villages and woodland walks comes with a generous side of movie magic. Condé Nast Traveler