Where Narnia: The Magician's Nephew Was Filmed in London

After a seventeen-year gap since the last live-action Narnia film, Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew is heading to cinemas worldwide in February 2027, and its crew spent the second half of 2025 and the start of 2026 filming across real London streets, courtyards and riverbanks, redressed to look like the winter of 1955. It’s the first-ever screen adaptation of this particular book: C. S. Lewis’s own origin story for Narnia, published last of the seven novels in The Chronicles of Narnia but set chronologically first. Because so much of that story happens in the “real world” before anyone finds a way into Narnia, a genuine slice of London ended up as its backdrop.

This is a set-jetting guide, not a plot recap: nothing below reveals what happens once the story crosses into Narnia itself. What follows covers the five confirmed London filming locations, what the crew actually shot at each one, what it costs to visit in 2026, and a realistic one-to-two-day route for covering all of them without losing half a day to the Underground.

Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, Without Spoilers

Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew is a Netflix original film directed and co-written by Greta Gerwig, best known for Barbie and Little Women. It opens in cinemas worldwide, with the exception of France, on 12 February 2027, following IMAX-only sneak previews from 10 February. Netflix has committed to a minimum 45-day theatrical exclusivity window, its biggest theatrical bet on an original film to date. The film then streams on Netflix worldwide, including France, from 2 April 2027; France skips a cinema release entirely. Sony Pictures Releasing International handles distribution outside North America, China, Russia and France. The original plan was narrower: a two-week IMAX-exclusive run from Thanksgiving 2026, followed by a Christmas Day Netflix premiere. A six-week production shutdown after an on-set injury pushed the schedule back, and Netflix and Sony announced the current, larger release plan in May 2026.

The cast is led by two newcomers as the story’s central pair: David McKenna as Digory Kirke and Beatrice Campbell as Polly Plummer, both confirmed through set photography before Netflix’s own announcement. Around them: Emma Mackey as Jadis, the White Witch; Carey Mulligan as Digory’s mother, Mabel Kirke; Daniel Craig as Uncle Andrew, the story’s meddling amateur magician; and Kobna Holdbrook-Smith as Francis, a 1950s London cabman drawn from an established piece of Narnia lore. Meryl Streep is credited as the voice of Aslan on the official cast listing; the casting proved divisive when it surfaced in 2025, given the character’s traditionally male coding in C. S. Lewis’s allegory, and speculation flared again in May 2026 when Ciarán Hinds joined the cast without a disclosed role, though Streep remains the listed choice.

Two production details are worth knowing before visiting any of the locations below. First, Gerwig’s adaptation moves the story’s “real world” setting from the roughly 1900 implied by Narnia’s internal chronology to 1955, the year Lewis actually published the book. That’s why every London location below was dressed in ration-era, post-war costuming and vintage cars rather than Edwardian dress: what you’ll see described is a specific, deliberately chosen decade, not the London of today. Second, Netflix has never confirmed a budget. Wikipedia’s infobox and Bloomberg put the figure around $200 million; trade insiders, including The Town podcast and Dark Horizons, report a true cost north of $320 million, which would make it Netflix’s most expensive production to date. Either number points to the same story: this is by far Netflix’s biggest single bet on a film, which is part of why the theatrical strategy shifted so dramatically over the course of 2026.

Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich: 1950s London on a Baroque Stage

The Old Royal Naval College sits at the heart of Maritime Greenwich, a UNESCO World Heritage Site anchored by one of Sir Christopher Wren’s grandest commissions. Built between 1696 and 1712 as the Royal Hospital for Seamen, it was commissioned by Mary II after she witnessed wounded sailors returning from the Battle of La Hogue, and it housed retired and injured naval personnel until 1869. Its centrepiece is the Painted Hall, decorated by Sir James Thornhill between 1707 and 1726 and nicknamed “Britain’s Sistine Chapel”; it reopened in March 2019 after a three-year restoration.

The production dressed the college’s courtyards as 1950s London for a large-scale sequence, photographed on 11 January 2026, part of the same extended chase filmed across Manchester, London and Bradford since the previous August. It’s a well-worn location for period drama: Four Weddings and a Funeral, The King’s Speech, the 2012 Les Misérables and Netflix’s own The Diplomat all filmed here before Narnia arrived.

The grounds are free and open until 11pm, so an evening walk through the colonnades costs nothing even outside the Painted Hall’s hours. If you’re paying for the Hall itself, go early: the ceiling rewards slow looking, and the crowds thicken toward midday. Pair a visit with the Cutty Sark, Greenwich Park, or Greenwich Market, all a short walk away.

Tower of London: A Sequence the Book Never Wrote

Founded by William the Conqueror in 1066, with the White Tower completed by 1078, the Tower of London has been a royal residence, a fortress, a treasury, a prison and, since 1669, the public home of the Crown Jewels. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the most visited paid attractions in the country, drawing around 2.8 million visitors a year under the care of Historic Royal Palaces.

This is the location worth flagging clearly: the Tower of London doesn’t appear in C. S. Lewis’s novel at all. What the crew filmed here in mid-January 2026 is an original screen sequence, an action set-piece built specifically for the adaptation, with a stunt double standing in for Emma Mackey’s Jadis on horseback. The book does have Jadis loose and causing chaos in 1900s London early in the story, a well-known plot beat rather than a late twist, so the sequence reads as a bigger-scale expansion of that idea rather than an invention out of nowhere. Either way, don’t expect the Tower to have any basis in the source text: it’s a choice the film itself made, not something lifted from the page.

Tuesday and Thursday mornings tend to be the quietest, and the Crown Jewels queue, which can run past thirty minutes between 11am and 2pm, usually drops under ten minutes after 2:30pm. See the grounds and the White Tower first, eat lunch during the crowd peak, and save the Jewel House for the afternoon lull. If your visit stretches into the evening, the nightly Ceremony of the Keys, one of the oldest surviving military ceremonies in the world, is worth booking ahead.

St Bartholomew-the-Great: London’s Oldest Church, a Reported Cameo

St Bartholomew-the-Great is London’s oldest surviving parish church, founded in 1123 by Rahere, a courtier and jester at the court of Henry I who, according to tradition, vowed on a pilgrimage to Rome to found a hospital in London if he survived a serious illness. Henry I granted the land, and Rahere founded both this priory church and St Bartholomew’s Hospital next door, still operating on the same site as London’s oldest hospital. The church was consecrated in 1133.

The church has a long filming history of its own: Four Weddings and a Funeral, Shakespeare in Love, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Sherlock Holmes (standing in for St Paul’s crypt), Amazing Grace, Transformers: The Last Knight, Napoleon and Netflix’s own Mary & George have all shot here. Reports describe the Narnia production using it for a scene with “mystical atmosphere,” possibly a gateway-like space, though the church’s own filming-history page had not listed the production as of this guide’s most recent check. Treat that detail as reported rather than officially confirmed, and visit anyway: it’s a genuinely under-visited building relative to its screen credits.

The entrance sits on Cloth Fair, off West Smithfield. It’s free to enter for prayer, with a small donation typically requested from sightseers, and open 10am to 5pm Monday to Saturday, 1pm to 5pm on Sunday. Pair it with Smithfield Market, the Barbican Centre, or the fifteen-minute walk to St Paul’s Cathedral.

St James’s Park: Pelicans, Palaces and Post-War Streets

St James’s Park is the oldest of London’s Royal Parks, bordered by three royal palaces, and its history runs through several very different eras. It began as marshland tied to a leper hospital before Henry VIII enclosed it as a deer park in 1532 and built the lodge that became St James’s Palace. James I improved the drainage, created Rosamond’s Pond and today’s Duck Island, and kept a private menagerie that included camels, crocodiles and an elephant. Charles II commissioned a French-style redesign in the 1660s, complete with a long canal where he reportedly met his mistress Nell Gwynn, and the naturalistic lake seen today dates to the 1820s, laid out under the Prince Regent by the architect John Nash.

St James’s Park is named among the production’s confirmed locations. Given its position between Whitehall and Westminster, both also confirmed filming areas, the sequences shot here are more likely exterior and transitional 1950s scenes than a single hero set-piece — background texture for characters moving through the city rather than a standalone destination in the story.

The park is free and open from 5am to midnight. Its pelicans have been in residence since 1664, a gift to Charles II from a Russian ambassador, and today’s flock of more than forty birds is usually fed around 2:30 to 3pm near Duck Island Cottage. Walk down The Mall for the classic view toward Buckingham Palace, or take in Horse Guards Parade and Admiralty Arch at the park’s edges.

Cornhill and the Bank Junction: Where the Cameras Started Rolling

Cornhill is a historic City of London street running between Bank Junction and Leadenhall Street, anchored by the Royal Exchange, founded in the sixteenth century by Sir Thomas Gresham and opened by Elizabeth I in 1571. It burned down in the Great Fire of 1666, was rebuilt in 1669, burned again in 1838, and reopened in its current neoclassical form under Queen Victoria in 1844.

This is where public filming first became visible, on 11 August 2025, the very start of principal photography, on the public roads around Cornhill and the Royal Exchange. The crew dressed it as a 1950s post-war street scene, and the standout detail was a giant billboard for a fictional housing development featuring a golden-maned lion, widely, if unofficially, read by fans as an Aslan nod even in a scene set entirely in the “real world.”

Cornhill itself is a public street with no admission or fixed hours; go early on a weekday morning for an empty frame before the commuter crowds arrive. The Bank of England Museum, free to enter, sits right at the junction, and Leadenhall Market, five minutes’ walk away, is itself a filming location: the Victorian arcade that doubled as the entrance to the Leaky Cauldron in the Harry Potter films. St Bartholomew-the-Great is a further fifteen to twenty minutes on foot.

Bonus Stops: The Thames Foreshore and Whitehall

Two further areas turn up in location reports without a single confirmed set-piece attached to either. The River Thames foreshore provided transitional and atmospheric shots, reportedly using the exposed, low-tide riverbank for texture rather than a specific scene; the Thames Path between the City and Greenwich, or a stretch on a Thames Clippers boat, recreates the same view. Whitehall and the surrounding Westminster area, including near the Robert Clive statue, reportedly saw filming too, described as extending “through to Westminster” from the St James’s Park work.

Neither site needs a dedicated stop on your itinerary so much as a slower walk between the ones that do. If you’re moving between the City locations and St James’s Park on foot or by river, you’re already passing through both.

Beyond London: Manchester, Bradford and the Studios

London wasn’t the only city that stood in for 1955. Manchester’s Castlefield, with its Roman ruins, Victorian viaducts and canals, supplied industrial backdrops, and Victoria Baths, an ornate Edwardian former public bathhouse sometimes nicknamed a “water palace,” hosted an interior sequence filmed between 26 and 30 August 2025; it runs its own public tours independent of the film. Bradford’s Little Germany, a district of Victorian warehouses, and the Manningham area, along with period-dressed streets including Cater Street, Currer Street, Bolton Road and Stott Hill, doubled for further 1950s scenes, complete with vintage red buses. Three studios did the rest of the work: Shepperton in Surrey as the main production hub, Cardington in Bedfordshire, where former airship hangars housed the largest fantasy set-pieces, and Longcross in Surrey for dialogue-driven interior scenes. None of the three studios offer public tours tied to this production.

Your Narnia Set-Jetting Itinerary

All five primary locations sit within Greater London and fit comfortably into a one-to-two-day route on public transport. Day one belongs to the City and the Tower: start at Bank and Cornhill in the morning, while the light and the streets are both quiet, then walk the thirty to forty-five minutes to St Bartholomew-the-Great, or take the Tube one stop. Arrive at the Tower of London around midday, cover the grounds and the White Tower first, eat lunch during the crowd peak if you’re flexible, and save the Crown Jewels for after 2:30pm. Finish with a stroll along the Thames Path toward Tower Bridge.

Day two belongs to Greenwich and the parks: take a Thames Clippers boat from central London to Greenwich Pier in the morning, itself a secondary filming stretch, then spend a couple of hours at the Old Royal Naval College, adding the Cutty Sark or Greenwich Park if time allows. Head back by DLR or Tube in the early afternoon, and time St James’s Park for around 2:30 to 3pm to catch the pelican feeding. Walk The Mall to Buckingham Palace, and finish near Westminster and Whitehall, the last of the secondary filming areas, before heading back to your accommodation.

A short list of what’s worth booking ahead, and what isn’t:

• Tower of London: book online ahead, especially for a Tuesday or Thursday morning visit
• Old Royal Naval College Painted Hall: optional, but worth booking ahead in summer
• St Bartholomew-the-Great, St James's Park and Cornhill: no booking needed, walk up any time
• Guided tours and river cruises: reserve a few days ahead in peak season, June to September

Visiting around the 12 February 2027 theatrical release, or the 2 April 2027 Netflix debut, likely means the heaviest concentration of Narnia-related coverage and signage in London, if that timing appeals. Outside those windows, the locations themselves don’t change: they’re simply quieter.

Practical Guide: Visas, Transport and Budget

The best months to visit are March to May and September to October, when the weather is milder and the crowds thinner. June through September is peak season, tied to UK school holidays, and January and February are the cheapest, with rates running 30 to 50 percent below summer peaks, though October is the wettest month, with around 21 rain days on average.

Since 25 February 2026, roughly 85 visa-exempt nationalities, including the United States, Canada, Australia and all 27 EU member states, need an approved UK Electronic Travel Authorisation before boarding a flight to the UK; it’s strictly enforced. The fee is £20, valid for two years or until the passport expires, covering multiple stays of up to six months each. Apply through the UK ETA app or gov.uk; approval is usually decided within minutes. British and Irish citizens are exempt.

All five primary locations sit in Travel Zones 1 and 2, and a contactless card works exactly like an Oyster card, with identical fares and daily caps. Budget roughly £100 to £150 a day for attractions, transport and food combined, excluding flights and accommodation; a mid-range London hotel currently averages around £210 a night.

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