With film crews (and Hugh Jackson and Emma Thompson) camped out in Hambleden for the whole of July, we’ve had a look back at the small Buckinghamshire village’s history on the big screen.
Wide expanses of countryside and chocolate box hamlets just a short drive from London have long drawn filmmakers of all stripes to Buckinghamshire, and the county can count a vast array of productions – and A-listers – among its visitors over the past few decades.
Crews are often in and out so quickly they’re hard to spot, but when a particularly evocative ready-made set is stumbled on, they may stick around for a little while longer – as is the case with the month-long set-up for quirky mystery-comedy Three Bags Full, based five miles outside Marlow in the village of Hambleden until the end of the month.
As silver screen fanatics hop on the train down from London and trek down winding roads in the hopes of spotting Hugh Jackman or Nicholas Galitzine, they should know producer Lindsay Doran isn’t the first to be won over by the village’s pretty red brick cottages and acres of beech woodland.
Hambleden was also the inspiration for Tim Burton’s 1991 horror/fantasy film Sleepy Hollow, with stars Johnny Depp and Christina Ricci similarly spending a month in Bucks, making full use of the valley’s rural charm in contrast to scenes set in busy 18th-century London.
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Alongside the iconic Cobstone Windmill down the road in Turville, Hambleden also played host to Dick van Dyke and co. for the 1967 filming of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, with St Mary the Virgin Church making a cameo in a scene showing the family hurtling through the village in the titular magic car.
And The Stag and Huntsman pub appeared in the 1996 film 101 Dalmatians, with the village centre also serving as a backdrop for Wycombe native James Corden and Emily Blunt’s characters in Into the Woods (2014).
It's not even the first time Emma Thompson has been spotted treading the cobblestone streets of Hambleden, making her first trip way back in the late 2000s for Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang.
Filmmakers grassed over the hamlet to transform it into a village green for the Nanny McPhee sequel – not worlds away from the construction of several fake shopfronts by the Three Bags Full team last week.
And back in 2022, its chocolate box appeal was dialled up to 100 for Disney’s Disenchanted, the sequel to 2007 hit Enchanted which saw Hambleden transformed into a fairytale film set, complete with mocked-up flower displays, picture-perfect shopfronts and lots of colourful bunting.
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