University College, Gower Street, WC1

If you’re a fan of cosy fifties comedies, you’ll doubtless recognise the domed, neo-Classical building of University College on Gower Street as ‘St Swithin’s’, where those oddly middle-aged medical students, Dirk Bogarde, Kenneth More and Donald Sinden, plunder every known enema and bedpan joke for Ralph Thomas’s 1954 comedy Doctor in the House.

The director’s brother Gerald Thomas (who helmed the Carry On... series) tried to repeat the formula in 1961 with Raising the Wind, but a music academy proved no substitute for a teaching hospital, though the building remains suspiciously similar to ‘St Swithin’s’.

Although University College bears little resemblance to the British Museum – apart from having a dome – it stood in for the museum in not one but two mummy movies. In 1980 Mike Newell inflicted The Awakening, a turgid adaptation of Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars with a bewhiskered Charlton Heston unwittingly summoning up Queen Kara in the museum’s Egyptian galleries, on the movie-going public (Newell survived and went on to make Four Weddings and a Funeral). Years later, Stephen Sommers’ The Mummy Returns, a warmed-over rehash of his phenomenally successful The Mummy, also passed off UCL as the British Museum.

More recently, it had become ‘The Bank of London’, targetted for robbery by The Hood (Ben Kingsley) in Thunderbirds, as the exterior of ‘St Thomas Hospital’ in Atonement; and – finally – as a university (albeit Bristol University) in Starter For Ten.

Trivia: the Gower Street building was designed by William Wilkins, who later designed the National Gallery.

The Mummy Returns (2001, dir: Stephen Sommers)
Doctor In The House (1954, dir: Ralph Thomas)
Raising The Wind (1961, dir: Gerald Thomas)
The Awakening (1980, dir: Mike Newell)
Thunderbirds (2004, dir: Jonathan Frakes)
Atonement (2007, dir: Joe Wright)
Starter For Ten (2006, dir: Tom Vaughan)