The new war film Pressure tells a story most history books skim over: the D-Day landings didn't just hinge on troops and tanks, but on one man's weather forecast. Andrew Scott plays James Stagg, the Scottish meteorologist tasked by General Eisenhower with calling the exact window for the 6 June 1944 invasion of Normandy. Get it wrong and a storm could scatter more than 150,000 Allied troops; get it right and the biggest seaborne invasion in history could go ahead. Stagg butts heads with rival forecaster Irving P. Krick and with Eisenhower himself, all while millions of lives hang on his prediction.
Rather than heading to the actual D-Day sites, the production shot the whole thing in England, and the locations are half the appeal for anyone who likes their film tourism with a side of history.
The film's centrepiece, the Allied Headquarters, ended up at Mentmore Towers in Buckinghamshire, a grand 19th-century country house built for the Rothschild family. Director Anthony Maras reportedly scouted more than 100 buildings before settling on it. The real headquarters, Southwick House in Hampshire, was considered but ruled out — it's still an active military base, hemmed in by post-war construction, so it wouldn't pass as 1944 on camera.
Just beyond Mentmore's gates is St Mary's Church, Mentmore, which also appears in the film. It's a proper slice of English history: the church is mentioned in the Domesday Book, and a wooden structure likely stood on the site before the current medieval building.
Other key scenes moved around the south east and beyond. Rand Bros Farm, on the edge of Royston in Hertfordshire, was dressed up as the London-to-Portsmouth route for the film's early sequences. RAF Halton Airfield — founded during the First World War and still an active training base, making it one of the UK's oldest and largest airfields — stood in for the film's aviation scenes. And the port of embarkation, where troops and submarines set off towards the French coast, was played by The Historic Dockyard Chatham in Kent, a long-time favourite of film crews thanks to its intact Georgian and Victorian naval architecture.
For travellers, this is a neat cluster to build a trip around. Mentmore village and the church are easily combined with the Chilterns, while Royston sits up in Hertfordshire's border country. Chatham's dockyard is a full-day attraction in its own right, with historic warships and rope-making heritage on site — and it pairs well with a visit to nearby Rochester. And if the film leaves you hungry for the real thing, Southwick House and the D-Day beaches of Normandy remain the pilgrimage for the full story.