28 Years Later: The Bone Temple | 2026
- Locations |
- Northumberland;
- Tyne & Wear;
- Cumbria;
- West Yorkshire;
- North Yorkshire
- DIRECTOR |
- Nia DaCosta
The next part of the 28 Years Later saga was once again filmed around northeast England, in The Lake District, Tyne & Wear and North Yorkshire. Find out precisely where.
The jaw-dropping surprise ending of Danny Boyle's' 28 Years Later takes the saga off into a bizarre and disturbing direction.
The film is much more enclosed with fewer locations, and some of the previous ones being revisited.
The main location is the "temple" of the title, the bizarre Memento Mori construction of Dr Ian Kelson's (Ralph Fiennes) encampment as he heroically tries to rehabilitate the fearsome infected Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry).
The collection of more than 250,000 artificial bones and 5,500 skulls took the production team more than six months to assemble into those columns, on grassland alongside the River Ure, just south of the village of Redmire, about 4 miles west of Leyburn in Wensleydale in the Yorkshire Dales, North Yorkshire.
The abandoned railway train also returns, triggering a most unexpected flashback.
Again, this is the old Class 31 Diesel locomotive which was hired for the production and filmed on the Embsay & Bolton Abbey Steam Railway, a stretch of the old Midland Railway running as a heritage railway for four miles from Embsay to Bolton Abbey, east of Skipton in North Yorkshire.
The opening, with Spike (Alfie Williams) facing a life-or-death test to join the Jimmies cult led by Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal Jack O'Connell) in the empty swimming pool of an abandoned leisure centre, was filmed in the Richard Dunn Sports Centre, Sunny Bank Road, Odsal, to the south of Bradford. Built in 1978 as the 'Odsal Big Top', it was renamed in honour of local boxer Richard Dunn – who once faced Muhammad Ali for the World Heavyweight Title (spoiler: he didn't win). The Centre closed down in 2019 but its distinctive Brutalist architecture (which we don't really see) saw it granted listed status in 2022.
The forest, in which survivors try to evade the infected, is Chopwell Wood, south of the village of High Spen about 10 miles south west of Gateshead, Tyne & Wear. Relatively free of flesh-eating zombies in real life, it's a pleasant woodland crossed by miles of walking trails.
The farmhouse overrun by the Jimmies is Plankey Mill Farm, southwest of Haydon Bridge, Northumberland, where Spike spent his first night away from Lindisfarne in 28 Years Later. It was until recently a campsite but has since been closed.
The epilogue, no spoilers, set in that magnificent mountainous landscape, is Bowness Cottage in Ennerdale, alongside Ennerdale Water, in the Lake District National Park, Cumbria. Due to its remote location, the lack of a public road up the valley, and its management by Forestry England, the National Trust and United Utilities, Ennerdale is relatively unspoiled. Ennerdale Water has not been as affected as other lakes in the National Park by construction, activity on the lake or the trappings of tourism, but it has been proposed as a nuclear waste facility.
