CREDITS X-MEN, 2000 dir: Bryan Singer Patrick Stewart Ian McKellen Hugh Jackman Anna Paquin James Marsden Halle Berry Famke Janssen Ray Park

“Mutation – it is the key to our evolution. It has enabled us to evolve from a single-celled organism into the dominant species on the planet. This process is slow, and normally taking thousands and thousands of years. But every few hundred millennia, evolution leaps forward. ”

Magneto, Wolverine, Rogue and the rest of the mutant crew are finally brought to the screen in Bryan Singer's darkly intelligent comic-strip adaptation, set around 'New York' but made almost entirely in Ontario, Canada.

The opening concentration camp scene, in ‘Poland, 1944’, used the old Gooderham-Worts Distillery, Mill Street toward the Toronto waterfront, an abandoned complex whose empty warehouses are frequently used as makeshift studios (Blues Brothers 2000, Chicago, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Mimic, The Recruit and Three Men and a Baby are among many movies shot here).

The lowlife bar in ‘northern Alberta’ where Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is first discovered cage-fighting is also the old distillery.

X-Men: Magneto discovers his powers in the ‘concentration camp’: Gooderham Worts Distillery, Toronto

In central Toronto is the dazzling metal and glass centre of the senate hearings, the Metro Hall Council Chamber, St John Street, and the ‘Ellis Island’ meeting place for the Conference of World Leaders, which is Central Commerce Collegiate, 570 Shaw Street, west of the city.

X-Men: The senate hearings: Metro Hall, St John Street, Toronto, Toronto

The stretch of road where Wolverine’s truck is attacked is east of Toronto in nature conservation area, the Rouge River Valley Park.

X-Men: ‘Dr Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters’: Parkwood Estate, Oshawa Photograph: Parkwood estate

Further east still, in the city of Oshawa you’ll find ‘Mutant High’, Dr Xavier’s ‘School for Gifted Youngsters’, supposedly in ‘Westchester’, in reality the Parkwood Estate, 270 Simcoe Street North, which you might recognise from Adam Sandler comedy Billy Madison, Shirley MacLaine’s Mrs Winterbourne, Bulletproof Monk with Yun-Fat Chow or Hollywoodland with Ben Affleck.

The interior of the school, though, is Casa Loma, 1 Austin Terrace at Spadina Road, a turn-of-the-century mock-medieval folly overlooking northern Toronto. The building is a frequent film location (see it in David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers and in Jean-Claude van Damme actioner Maximum Risk), and here you’ll find the study of Dr Xavier (Patrick Stewart), the conservatory where mutant children learn to channel their skills, and the old Stables, where Cyclops (James Marsden) keeps his bike.

X-Men: Cyclops stashes his bike: Stables, Casa Loma, Toronto

The lair of militant leader Magneto (Ian McKellen) was constructed in a forest clearing at the Greenwood Conservation Area in Hamilton, about 40 miles southwest of Toronto.

‘Westchester Railway Station’, to which Cerebro traces Rogue ( Anna Paquin), and Magneto uses his electromagnetic powers to levitate the police cars, is also Hamilton, the CNR (Canadian National Railway) Station, James Street North, Hamilton, which was also the location of the spectacular shoot-out in The Long Kiss Goodnight.

No, that's not the real Statue of Liberty. ‘Liberty Island’ is actually Spencer Smith Park in Burlington, east of Hamilton, while some of the interior shots of the statue are the Bridgeman Transformer Station.

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