Channel 4's new adaptation of Barbara Taylor Bradford's A Woman of Substance hops between young Emma Harte's rise in Edwardian Yorkshire and Brenda Blethyn's older Emma battling family threats in 1970s New York. Fittingly, almost all of it was shot in the north of England — with New York largely faked on Liverpool's waterfront.
The 1975 Manhattan street scenes were filmed near the Pier Head, where a CGI skyscraper now towers over St Nicholas' Church and the Tower Building. Harte's department store is the Royal Liver Building, Europe's tallest when it opened in 1911 and today a tourist draw with a 360-degree observation deck. Interiors came next door: the grand octagonal hall of the Port of Liverpool Building, one of the "Three Graces" lining the Mersey. Emma's office, staircase and corridors? Barnsley Town Hall, a 1930s classical pile with a broad central staircase — the New York skyline outside was added in post.
Fairley Hall, the series' great house, is Broughton Hall near Skipton, now trading as Broughton Sanctuary. The Tempest family has held the estate since 1097; the current manor dates to 1597, with a dome-topped conservatory added in the 19th century. The interiors and gardens doubles included Brodsworth Hall near Doncaster, with 15 acres of restored Victorian gardens. Emma's early-1900s home is a shooting lodge on the edge of Keighley Moor, while the drama of the moors plays out at the Cow and Calf Rocks on Ilkley Moor — a popular local climbing spot — and the Fairy Cave near Grassington, a limestone chamber excavated in the 1890s that yielded prehistoric flints and ancient animal bones.
For the Armley high-street scenes, the production went to Beamish, the open-air Living Museum of the North in County Durham. Emma's first Emporium shop is the museum's Annfield Plain Co-op, and the bandstand square from episode five sits just around the corner. Her marital home is the former museum building at Thwaite Mills, a water-powered site in Leeds, while the factory scenes used Quarry Bank Mill in Styal, Cheshire — built in 1784 and one of the best-preserved Industrial Revolution textile mills in the country. Bradford's Grade I-listed Venetian Gothic City Hall, with its clock tower, rounds out the list in episode seven.
For set-jetters, this is a route map of two regions: a Yorkshire Dales and West Yorkshire circuit taking in Skipton, Ilkley Moor, Grassington, Leeds and Bradford, plus a Liverpool waterfront stop that doubles for New York. Most locations are open to the public, from Beamish's living-history streets to the Liver Building's viewing deck, making it easy to walk in Emma Harte's footsteps without a film permit.
