Hollywood comes to town

We decided to go to Canteen in Spitalfields for an early dinner and stumbled across a huge film set. Living in London you get use to seeing filming quite a bit but I'd never seen anything on this scale. The whole area between the back of Liverpool Street Station to Worship Street was full of crew, trucks, cameras, lighting rigs, cars, sets and props. We had to ask a number of different people before someone finally told us what they were filming. It's a new film called Jack Ryan based on a Tom Clancy book. Its directed by Kenneth Branagh and stars Chris Pine and Keira Knightley. The whole area had been changed to look like a Russian city street scene with a banking or corporation headquarters. There must have been over forty cars with Russian plates and a 100ft lighting rig floodlighting the whole area. We didn't see any action as the stars were on a dinner break and it was too cold to hang around waiting. This is why I love living in London as you never know what you're going to come across!


Appold Street, London