Somerset House, the Strand, WC2

And so the magic carpet of cinema wafts us from London to Russia and to New York... Well, if I'm going to trot out that tired old cliché, where better to use it than for Somerset House.

When this 18th century palace, on the south side of the Strand, was to be the registry of births, marriages and deaths, The Jackal (Edward Fox) collected his false birth certificate here in Fred Zinnemann’s 1973 film The Day of the Jackal.

The registry subsequently relocated to St Catherine’s House, at which point the handsome central courtyard was relegated to the role of car park. During this time it saw frequent service as a movie backdrop, featuring in two Pierce Brosnan Bond movies – in Goldeneye, the courtyard is the ‘St Petersburg’ square where Jack Wade (Joe Don Baker) uses a sledgehammer to fix his car after picking up James Bond from the airport. It was magically reinvented as the ‘Ministry of Defence’ in Tomorrow Never Dies.

In Billy Wilder’s superb The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Somerset House provides the exterior of ‘The Diogenes Club’, the comfortable retreat of Sherlock’s smarter, older brother Mycroft (Christopher Lee). It’s a club again, ‘Pratt’s’, where Viggo Mortensen calls on Nicole Kidman in Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady.

Brian Gilbert’s biopic Wilde turned the courtyard into the exterior of the writer’s West End apartment, Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow passed it off (with a little CGI) as turn-of-the-century ‘Manhattan’ and in Shanghai Knights it’s ‘Buckingham Palace’ where, with a bit of prompting from Owen Wilson, Jackie Chan invents the kung fu movie.

Somerset House underwent a major refurbishment during the late 1990s, to become a centre for the visual arts, and its carpark has been transformed into a pleasant fountain court, through which Aishwarya Rai dances in Bride And Prejudice, and in winter, a skating rink, which is how it appears in Love Actually.

Somerset House

Goldeneye (1995, dir: Martin Campbell)
Tomorrow Never Dies (1997, dir: Roger Spottiswoode)
Love Actually (2003, dir: Richard Curtis)
Bride And Prejudice (2004, dir: Gurinder Chadha)
The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes (1970, die: Billy Wilder)
The Portrait Of A Lady (1996, dir: Jane Campion)
Wilde (1998, dir: Brian Gibson)
Sleepy Hollow (1999, dir: Tim Burton)
Shanghai Knights (2003, dir: David Dobkin)