Book Review - "Movie London: Exploring the City Film-By-Film" by Tony Reeves

If you love movies and you've sometimes felt a sense of deja vu when walking down a London street, or you've wondered how they filmed that Bond movie chase scene in St. Petersburg (Answer: It was Somerset House in London), Movie London is a great little guide book. It parses London, neighborhood by neighborhood, street by street and film by film (in some areas, even house by house or pub by pub), so wherever you are in London you know where you've seen it before.

Comprehensive and a top gift for a film buff.

Movie London is inescapable. Most people who visit London are haunted by the unshakeable impression that they've been here before or seen it all before. Some of that, of course, comes from seeing pictures of Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace and so forth in the media.

But Movie London has been the star of more films than you might imagine. There are the obvious stories set in London but here are a few more you may not have considered:

• The Russian Church in Tomorrow Never Dies was in fact the crematorium in London's Brompton Cemetery
• In the same film, a remote controlled BMW careers around a multi-story parking garage in Hamburg, Germany - but it's really the Brent Cross Shopping Centre in North London.
• Susan Sarandon's West Side New York Clinic in The Hunger is actually Senate House on Malet Street in London.
• The doors of Chelsea and Westminster Hospital on the Fulham Road stood in for a New York hospital in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut

And so it goes. The book also chases down the locations of hundreds of movies set in London or elsewhere in England. And wherever you are in London, chances are you can open the book and find the setting of a film you've seen.

In addition to the street-by-street sections, the book also has several themed pages in the center, with glossy color photos covering:

• Bond Streets
• London Rom-Coms
• London Gangsters
• The Scary City
• Swinging Sixties London
• Hitchcock's London
• Literary London
• Poptastic Metropolis

This is full of the kind of entertaining film trivia that will keep any traveling film buff happy for days. It's great fun and a top gift.