The Savoy, The Strand, WC2

Once a traditional turn-of-the-century hotel, the Savoy Hotel on the Strand was perked up in 1929 with an unmistakable stainless steel, art-deco frontage – straight out of an RKO musical.

Fiercely patriotic gangster Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) gives the dispassionate mafia bosses a mouthful when they unceremoniously dump him in the hotel, before he's abducted by IRA hitmen (with a young Pierce Brosnan wielding the gun) at the end of The Long Good Friday.

Movie actress Anna (Meryl Streep) and her husband stay at the Savoy in the modern-day scenes of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and Catherine Zeta-Jones tails Sean Connery to the ‘Cryptonic’ building from here at the opening of globetrotting 1999 thriller Entrapment.

The hotel is actually an addition to the Savoy Theatre, once home to the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, but since given a delicious thirties deco makeover (now painstakingly restored after a disastrous fire in 1990), which meant that when Mike Leigh came to make Topsy-Turvy, he had to use the unchanged Richmond Theatre in southwest London as a substitute.

Trivia: the Savoy's entrance court on the Strand is the only place in the UK where traffic drives on the right.

The Savoy

The Long Good Friday (1980, dir: John Mackenzie)
The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981, dir: Karel Reisz)
Entrapment (1999, dir: Jon Amiel)