Regardless of your opinion on ITV's adaptation of Sanditon, it's hard to deny the beauty of the English vistas featured by Andrew Davies. Sanditon itself is a fictional town - an appropriation of the seaside resorts which were gaining popularity in the period - but many of the locations used in Sanditon are local to the Jane Austen Centre in the South West of England.
Brean
Shots of the long stretches of sandy beach were filmed in the seaside town of Brean - a Somerset village nestled between Burnham-on-Sea and Weston Super Mare. Brean's name is derived from "Bryn", the Celtic word for hill and has a population of around 600 people.
Today, the village is popular with tourists and is home to a leisure park and tropical bird garden. Brean Sands is also a huge pull for land yachting enthusiasts and has played host to the world championships, with some boats reaching 60 miles per hour.
Clevedon
Some twelves miles north of Brean is the seaside town of Clevedon and it is here that much of the external footage was filmed. Clevedon rose to prominence as a resort in the Victorian era, so the producers used special sets and computery wizardry to take some aspects of Clevedon back to the early 19th Century.
Today, Clevedon retains much of its period charm with a beautiful Victorian pier reaching out into the sea beside its pebble beach. There's also a Victorian bandstand, a light railway and a marine lake, which is still popular with swimmers and watersports enthusiasts. The jetty close to the pier is also very popular with crabbers at high tide!
Dyrham Park
Doubling for Sanditon House - the home of Lady Denham - is Dyrham Park, a 17th century mansion and parkland located between Bath and Bristol. Filming also took place in Dyrham's grounds with a courtyard behind the greenhouse transformed with carriages and torches (along with a little bit of CGI) to play Sanditon by night.
Today, Dyrham Park is a property owned and maintained by the National Trust and is currently undergoing an extensive transformation with vital conservation work being performed on staircases, wall hangings and items in the house's collection. There's still plenty to see there though, and it's a popular same-day visit for visitors to The Jane Austen Centre.
The Bottle Yard Studios
Built in 2010, The Bottle Yard Studios are sited on the formery winery and bottling plant of John Harvey & Sons, and for years was the home of Harvey's Bristol Cream Sherry. This production facility in Whitchurch just outside Bristol is now the biggest in the South West of England.
The Bottle Yard Studios has been home to popular UK television drama such as Poldark, Sherlock, Wolf Hall and Broadchurch, as well as blockbuster movies such as Hellboy. Most of the internal location shots for Sanditon were filmed here.
4 comments
I love English literature and Jane Austen. I called my daughter Emma! ❤️ I love England because I studied there many years. England is home for me. My congrats for Sanditon because it means England!
Barbara
Does anyone know where the waterfall scene was filmed please?
Anonymous
Thank you for sharing the Sanditon locations with us. I was lucky enough to visit Dyrham Park in June this year and it was wonderful. We even got to see the attics where they are working on conserving pieces of art and where they store all the antiquities that aren’t within the period of which the house was built. We even got to see the work on the staircase. I have never read Sanditon so I cannot say whether the Andrew Davies version is true to the original or not but I am enjoying it immensely. Well Done Andrew for yet another superb dramatization of a Jane novel
Anonymous
While I am certainly enjoying seeing Clevedon again (I lived there for many years) and Dyrham Park I cannot say I am enjoying this adaption of Sanditon. For one who has loved this story for many years and in particular the completed version by Jane Austen and ‘Another Lady’ this adaption is so far from the delights of that book as can possibly be. In particular I find Sidney Parker’s character to be totally off the mark – the way he is portrayed here is much more akin to the brooding hero of the ‘bodice ripper’ type novels and nothing like a Jane Austen hero. I usually really enjoy Andrew Davies’ adaptions but not this time. I had so looked forward to this but, sadly, have been nothing but disappointed.
Anonymous
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