Liverpool in film and TV

A city that plays other cities better than it plays itself

Liverpool has one of the busiest film and TV production profiles of any UK city outside London, and the strange part is that it’s rarely playing itself on screen. Productions come to Liverpool not primarily to film Liverpool stories, but because its dense stock of well-preserved Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian architecture lets it stand in convincingly for other cities — most often London, sometimes Dublin, occasionally an unspecified generic “period Britain.” That’s an odd role for a city with such a strong, specific identity of its own, and it’s worth understanding why it happens before you go looking for filming locations.

Why Liverpool works as a stand-in

The core reason is architectural survival. Liverpool’s Georgian Quarter around Hope Street, along with large stretches of the city centre, escaped the kind of comprehensive Victorian and twentieth-century redevelopment that erased much of historic London’s streetscape. Because Liverpool’s economy declined sharply from the mid-twentieth century onward, there was, for decades, simply less money available to knock down old buildings and replace them — an economic misfortune that turned into an unplanned architectural preservation programme. The result is whole streets of intact period buildings without modern shopfronts, double-yellow lines or street clutter that need expensive digital removal in post-production, which makes Liverpool considerably cheaper to film in than equivalent locations in central London.

St George’s Hall, the Georgian terraces around Rodney Street and Falkner Square, and the warehouse streets around the Baltic Triangle and Stanley Dock have all appeared standing in for other cities across a run of major productions. Liverpool City Council and the local film office have leaned into this deliberately since the 2000s, actively marketing the city’s “doubling” potential to production companies rather than treating it as an occasional coincidence.

Notable productions filmed in Liverpool

The list of significant productions shot at least partly in Liverpool is long, and it spans genres. “Chariots of Fire” (1981) used Liverpool locations for its period British settings. “Peaky Blinders” filmed extensively around Liverpool and Stanley Dock’s warehouse district, using the city’s industrial-Georgian streetscape to stand in for 1920s Birmingham. Marvel’s “Captain America: The First Avenger” (2011) used Liverpool’s period streets for 1940s New York and London sequences. The city has also hosted filming for “Fantastic Beasts,” several major BBC and ITV period dramas, and a steady stream of lower-profile British TV productions that rarely get much attention for their Liverpool locations despite relying on them heavily.

This isn’t a recent trend, either — Liverpool’s role as a filming location dates back decades, but it’s intensified significantly since the 2010s as production budgets tightened and London locations became more expensive and harder to secure for extended shoots.

When Liverpool plays itself

Liverpool does appear as itself on screen too, most notably in “Boys from the Blackstuff,” Alan Bleasdale’s landmark 1982 drama about unemployment in the city during the Thatcher-era docks decline — a series still regarded as one of the most socially significant pieces of British television drama, and one that captured Liverpool’s economic hardship with a specificity that’s genuinely rooted in the real city rather than a generic backdrop. “Brookside,” the long-running Channel 4 soap opera set on a purpose-built close in the Liverpool suburb of West Derby, ran from 1982 to 2003 and became a genuine cultural fixture, tackling social issues with a boldness unusual for the soap format at the time. More recently, homegrown Liverpool-set productions have continued the tradition of the city playing itself rather than standing in for somewhere else, reflecting a modern industry that increasingly values authentic regional settings over blanket London-centricity.

Spotting the locations

If you want to see the streets that keep showing up as “London” or “1920s Birmingham” on screen, the Georgian Quarter around Rodney Street and Hope Street is the most reliably recognisable — our Georgian Liverpool guide covers the area’s architecture in detail, most of which will look familiar if you’ve watched much period British television in the past fifteen years. Stanley Dock’s warehouse district, north of the city centre, is the other major filming hub, with its raw industrial brick standing in for everything from Peaky Blinders’ Birmingham to various dystopian near-future settings.

For the full, regularly updated rundown of specific addresses and which productions used them, our dedicated Liverpool film locations guide is the more practical reference — productions change year to year, and film tourism interest tends to spike sharply around a show’s broadcast before settling into a smaller, steadier trickle of dedicated fans.

An accidental industry with real economic weight

What’s genuinely notable about Liverpool’s film and TV role is how much of it happened by economic accident rather than deliberate cultural strategy — decades of underinvestment preserved the built environment that now actively earns the city production revenue and, increasingly, screen tourism. It’s a strange kind of second life for streets that were, for much of the late twentieth century, simply too poor to redevelop. If you’re walking the Georgian Quarter admiring the architecture, there’s a reasonable chance you’re standing on a street that’s played somewhere else entirely on screen more often than it’s played Liverpool itself.