Christmas movie locations you can visit in real life
style & culture on location christmas art & culture
Caitlin Morton Jennifer M. Wood James Medd Jane Walker Lauren Burvill Abigail Malbon Condé Nast Traveller Sarah James Condé Nast
All of the Christmas movie locations you can visit in real life, from New York where Elf and Home Alone 2 were filmed, to Love Actually's London locations
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Watching this 2006 romcom may remind some viewers of the time they experimented with custard and cream on the Christmas pudding, but there’s no denying its jingle-bell factor and falling-snow credentials. The plot: heartbroken LA gal Amanda (Cameron Diaz) has a Christmas houseswap with also-heartbroken Surrey gel Iris (Kate Winslet). The result: new romances all round and some very lovely houses. Iris stays in a vast Tuscan-style villa in Brentwood – in fact a 1928-built Mission Revival house in San Marino – and also hangs out with composer Miles (Jack Black, for some reason) in his even lovelier Japanese Pavilion-style home in Silver Lake. Amanda, meanwhile, turns up at Iris’s darling little English country cottage in Surrey.

Filming for this took place in the undeniably picturesque village of Shere (pictured above), as seen in Four Weddings and a Funeral and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. You can drink in the White Horse pub and skip over the bridge over the River Tillingbourne, but you won’t find the house itself – it was built for the purpose in a field and pulled down once all the exterior shots were in the can. You can, though, follow Amanda on her romantic lunch trip with Iris’s brother Graham (Jude Law, the lucky lady), filmed in the grounds of nearby Cornwell Manor.

This squidgy-sweet romcom, a none-more-Curtis coalition of actual Love Actually star Emma Thompson and Bridesmaids director Paul Feig, is a picture-postcard showcase for 21st-century London. Kate (Emilia Clarke) works in a Christmas shop in Covent Garden market, and bumps into persistent customer Tom (Henry Golding) parking his bike in the area’s Victorian shopping street Cecil Court (as seen in 1987’s 84 Charing Cross Road and 2006’s Miss Potter). Kate performs at the collonaded St Mary’s Church in Marylebone, disguised as a homeless shelter, and the pair enjoy a tryst in the Phoenix Garden, the community-built space behind the Phoenix Theatre, on Stacey Street. For a bit of urban edge, we also see Brick Lane, where Tom has his flat, and the recently hipsterised Brixton Market, before heading to the skating rink at Alexandra Palace on Muswell Hill, in the north of the city.

Medieval knight Sir Cole (Josh Whitehouse) travels through time to modern-day Ohio during the festive season: a pun in search of a plot, sure, but why fight it? There he meets unlucky-in-love Brooke (Vanessa Hudgens) and holiday-themed hi-jinks ensue. For reasons hard to fathom, this version of Ohio is actually Canada, with scenes shot in Orillia and Bracebridge. The latter is particularly pertinent, being the real-life home of Santa’s Village, a year-round celebration of all things Yule. Meanwhile, for that all-important Middle Ages authenticity, the production travelled to Tullamore in Ireland to film at Charleville Castle. This 18th-century Gothic Revival construction has a strong CV including Northanger Abbey (2007) and Becoming Jane (2007) but is best known as one of the most haunted castles in Europe, a regular on shows such as Most Haunted.

Noelle (2019)

Disney’s direct-to-stream offering is a sass-fest of a Christmas movie, with Anna Kendrick’s daughter of Santa forced to save Christmas in the face of the incompetent and ageing Christmas-family menfolk. It’s another seasonal flick to take advantage of Canada’s year-round frosty conditions: filming took place in Vancouver, including the Saint James Music Academy and the busy shopping district of Gastown, as well as the ski resort of Whistler, which gives the film some inspiring scenery. Production then moved down south, all the way to Georgia, shooting a sleigh-crash in a mall in the town of Woodstock, specially redecorated for the occasion with seasonal shops.

His glass-panelled skyscraper office is the Seagram Building (pictured above), designed by Mies van der Rohe no less, at 375 Park Avenue – that’s where the Ghost of Christmas Past dangles him out of the window. We also see him by the famous Christmas tree in front of the Rockefeller Center but once those ghosts arrive he’s all over town. The A&M Club he visits is the Atlantic Grill on West 64th Street, but later he’s in Queens, Long Island and (a bit of a stretch this one) Ontario.