Filming locations in London

London plays itself more often than anywhere on earth, and a set-jetting day here is really a string of neighbourhoods, each one borrowed by a different screen story. The trick is to pick a corner of the map and walk it, because the spots cluster far more tightly than the city's size suggests.

Start in the west, in Notting Hill, where the 1999 romance of the same name left two of its best-loved landmarks within a few minutes of each other. The blue door on Westbourne Park Road is the entrance to William's flat, still a private home you photograph from the pavement, and Portobello Road Market just around the corner is where he walks through the seasons in that single unbroken take. Come on a Saturday morning for the antiques stalls, before the crush.

Crime and mystery have their own pockets. Sherlock's 221B is not on Baker Street at all but a Georgian terrace on North Gower Street near Euston, with Speedy's café below standing in for the downstairs neighbour, while the detective staged his shocking rooftop fall at St Bartholomew's Hospital by Smithfield, Britain's oldest still on its original site. South of the river, Borough Market and the corner pub beside it, The Globe Tavern, are the lived-in patch beneath Bridget Jones's famous flat, best mid-week when the food stalls have room to breathe.

The grander end of the canon hides in plain sight too. The round 12th-century Temple Church, tucked inside the quiet legal courtyards of the Inns of Court, is a key stop on The Da Vinci Code's treasure hunt, and Lancaster House in St James's supplies the gilded staircases that double for Buckingham Palace in The Crown, though it only opens on the odd Open House weekend, so check ahead.

For something gentler, ride out to Richmond, the leafy riverside suburb that is the whole world of Ted Lasso. The green and the pub beside it are the team's local, and the handsome Georgian arch of Richmond Bridge, the oldest surviving Thames crossing in London, appears in the show's strolls along the water. Paddington fans can add the great Victorian terminus that gives the bear his name, complete with his bronze statue on platform one, and the skyline view from Primrose Hill above the pastel streets the Browns call home.

The one rule London rewards is to theme your afternoon rather than chase the whole list. Everything sits on a Tube line, so you can knock off Notting Hill in a morning and the South Bank after lunch, but trying to cross the city for a single doorway will eat your day in transit. Pick a story, walk its streets, and let the rest wait for the next trip.