HBO's new drama War has given London a rare glossy close-up. The eight-part series, starring Sienna Miller and Dominic West as a celebrity couple tearing each other apart in a high-stakes divorce, trades the usual skyline clichés for a tour of the city's grandest interiors — and several of them are real places you can walk into.
Production designer Debbie Burton deliberately avoided shooting the Shard in every frame, instead hunting for spots where Georgian, Victorian and neoclassical architecture collide with glass and steel. That thinking shaped the show's two rival law firms: Cathcarts (West's character's lawyers) got a Victorian exterior with an enclosed Art Deco feel, while Taylor & Byrne (representing Miller's Carla Duval) needed something open and light. After rejecting a stack of overly designed office lobbies — grass walls were a no — the team found a clean, understated space in Canary Wharf with real scale.
The confirmed filming locations are a treat for fans. That jaw-dropping moment in episode one, where Carla is served divorce papers at a film premiere, was shot outside BFI South Bank, with the institute visible in the background. Brasserie Zedel, the vast subterranean French brasserie beneath Piccadilly Circus, plays fictional restaurant Zinzolin, where aspiring lawyer Johnny (Archie Renaux) works as a waiter before a punch-up costs him the job.
The arbitration scenes, set at 'Marlborough House' on screen, were filmed at Skinners' Hall on Dowgate Hill near Cannon Street — a Grade I-listed building that's been home to the philanthropic Skinners' Association for centuries. Carla's chic living room, where she plots strategy with her lawyer Serena, is actually an event space at the Columbia Hotel in Lancaster Gate, a trio-turned-five Victorian townhouses. Burton furnished it with finds from Sunbury Antiques Market in Kempton, including chinoiserie and sideboards, to make it feel like the home of the show's style icon. Serena and her husband Nick's genteel home belongs to leafy, affluent Maida Vale.
One location breaks the London pattern: episode five takes us inside Zephyr HQ, Morgan's social media company, filmed at Mountbatten House in Basingstoke. The Grade II-listed 1970s modernist building, all brutalist lines and rooftop planting, is affectionately known as 'the Hanging Gardens of Basingstoke'.
Why care? Because unlike many prestige dramas shot behind closed studio doors, War's map doubles as a genuinely usable London itinerary. You can eat where Archie Renaux waited tables, catch a screening at the BFI, or at least gawp at the facades. It's also a fresh angle on the city — Old Money heritage halls and Canary Wharf glass side by side — that skips the usual postcard stops. Fans of the show, film-location hunters and anyone who likes their sightseeing with a side of courtroom drama will get the most out of this one.
