The History Boys | 2006

Alan Bennett's hugely successful play is brought to the screen by the production's original stage director Nicholas Hytner, who also filmed Bennett's The Madness of King George and The Lady In The Van.

It's set largely in a Yorkshire school of the 1980s, as Sixth Formers are being groomed for entrance exams for the prestigious universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

Many street scenes really are West Yorkshire but 'Cutler's Grammar School' is solidly Home Counties – closer to London and the film studios.

It's a mix, both interiors and exteriors were filmed at Watford Grammar School for Boys, Rickmansworth Road in Watford, Hertfordshire, and at Watford Grammar School for Girls on Lady's Close, Watford.

BTW: Watford is, of course, now famous as home to the Warner Bros Studio Tour.

The local roads along which unorthodox teacher Hector (Richard Griffiths) rides his motorbike while giving lifts to his long-suffering though good-natured pupils are in the Claremount district of Halifax, a city southwest of Bradford in West Yorkshire.

We're introduced to Posner (Samuel Barnett) cycling along Belgrave Avenue to Claremount Road where he meets up with the devout Scripps (Jamie Parker) outside St Thomas Church.

The curve at New Bank is seen several times throughout the film, finally taking on a much greater significance.

Still in West Yorkshire, the WWI memorial alongside which cynical teacher Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore) is taken aback by the boys' ability to recite Philip Larkin's poem MCMXIV (1914) is at Hullen Edge Park, Hullenedge Road in Elland between Halifax and Huddersfield.

The school trip, for a lesson on on Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries, takes the lads to North Yorkshire. The ruins are Fountains Abbey, about three miles southwest of Ripon, and it's here they pose for the class photograph. A Cistercian monastery, founded in 1132, the site is now a World Heritage Site, owned by the National Trust.

The Abbey had previously been the main setting for Bennett's first TV play, A Grand Day Out, in 1972.

Fountains was used for the climax of Omen III: The Final Conflict in 1980, as well as being seen in both the 1993 and 2020 screen versions of The Secret Garden and more recently in Danny Boyle's 28 Years Later.

Now fully primed, the boys head off to their make-or-break interviews – with establishing beauty shots of both Cambridge (St John's College) and – mainly – Oxford (including famous sites such as Oxford Camera).

Posner and Akhtar (Sacha Dhawan) discuss their interviews at Magdalen College (pronounced "Maudlen").

One of the the University's most prestigious colleges, Magdalen has been seen onscreen in the Merchant-Ivory film of EM Forster’s Howards End, Richard Attenborough’s Shadowlands, the 2008 adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, the 1997 biopic Wilde with Stephen Fry as the great writer, and in Emerald Fennell's wicked 2023 Saltburn.

Apart from both Oscar Wilde and his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas – 'Bosie', Magdalen's former students include the Duke of Windsor (formerly King Edward VIII before he abdicated) and CS Lewis (author of the Narnia books).

Meanwhile Dakin (Dominic Cooper), oddly fascinated by Irwin, does a little research on the teacher's background at Corpus Christie College on Merton Street.

Oxford is about an hour from London, by train from Paddington Station. If you're visiting, most colleges have a central grassy quadrangle which is often open to the public.

Apart from the films mentioned, you'll also see Oxford in the Harry Potter movies, 1984's Another Country, 1997's The Saint (with Val Kilmer), classic 1988 comedy A Fish Called Wanda, X-Men: First Class (where else would the young Prof Xavier have studied?) and even Michael Cimino's epic Western Heaven's Gate – in which the Sheldonian Theatre and Mansfield College Quad stand in for 'Harvard University'.

There's still some location trickery though. That imposing wood-panelled study in which blunt, plain-speaking Rudge (Russell Tovey) faces his inquisitors is the Alex Fitch Room at Harrow School, Harrow-on-the-Hill in Greater London.

The name comes from the Fitch family, who donated the room in memory of their son Alex, an Old Harrovian, who died in the First World War.

That elaborate panelling is Elizabethan, the fireplace dates from the reign of Henry V and the floor is made of decking from HMS Vincent the battleship, which served during the reign of George III.

Harrow Old Schools was founded in 1572 under a Royal Charter granted by Elizabeth I, and remains one of the country’s most prestigious schools – old boys include a clutch of Prime Ministers, writers as diverse as Lord Byron, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Anthony Trollope – and screenwriter Richard Curtis (Four Weddings And A Funeral, Notting Hill, Love Actually...).

Harrow is no stranger to the screen, also appearing as Professor Flitwick’s Charms Class at 'Hogwarts' for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, and providing the interior of ‘Trinity College’ in Stephen Hawking biopic, The Theory Of Everything.

And when the nervously awaited results are eventually delivered, the high-rise block outside which Lockwood (Andrew Knott) receives his letter is Munden View on Garsmouth Way back in Watford.

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