Priory Church of St Bartholomew The Great, West Smithfield, EC1

St Bartholomew’s, and the adjoining hospital – affectionately known as St Bart’s – were founded by Rahere, one-time jester to King Henry I, who was stricken with a bout of malaria on a trip to Rome. The sick man had a vision of St Bartholomew and vowed that if he recovered and made it back home, he’d found a church and a hospital. And that’s just what he did, in 1123.

What you see today is only a fraction of the original church. The path leading from the gate to what is now the entrance to the church was once the nave of a much larger building. After Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, the church was variously used as stables and as a printing works (Benjamin Franklin worked here).

The church became ‘St Julian’s’, in which Charles (Hugh Grant) has second thoughts about marrying Duckface in Four Weddings And A Funeral. William Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) begs forgiveness here after hearing about the murder of Kit Marlowe (Rupert Everett) in Shakespeare In Love, and Sarah Miles (Julianne Moore) remonstrates with God, while investigator Parkis and his son spy on her, in Neil Jordan’s The End Of The Affair.

St Bartholomew’s became the interior of ‘Nottingham Cathedral’ for Robin Hood, Prince Of Thieves. This is also the church in which John Newton (Albert Finney) serves out penance for his past as a slave trader in Amazing Grace, and since became 'Fotheringay Castle' in which Mary Queen of Scots (Samantha Morton) is beheaded in Elizabeth: The Golden Age.

Trivia: for Robin Hood, ‘Nottingham Castle square’ sat on the backlot at Shepperton Studios, though the castle itself – in longshot – is the fortified city of Carcassonne down in the south of France close to the Spanish border.

Church of St Bartholomew the Great

Robin Hood, Prince Of Thieves (1991, dir: Kevin Reynolds)
Four Weddings And A Funeral (1994, dir: Mike Newell)
Shakespeare In Love (1998, dir: John Madden)
The End Of The Affair (1999, dir: Neil Jordan)
Amazing Grace (2006, dir: Michael Apted)
Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007, dir: Shekhar Kapur)