My home town of Hemel Hempstead is apparently the ‘new Hollywood’ – now I’ve seen everything

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We’re not even two months in, and already this yr has provided up some pretty sudden components – I’ve snogged a 26-year-old, modified jobs and wept at an episode of Swedish Love is Blind. But I let you know what I positively didn’t have on my bingo card for 2024: Hemel Hempstead being named “the new Hollywood”.

It’s been dubbed as such by the native council after it was used as a filming location for the Ricky Gervais dramedy After Life and, extra lately, Spielberg and Tom Hanks’s Second World War epic Masters of the Air. Other TV sequence have filmed scenes domestically, too, corresponding to Grantchester and Ladhood, however Amy Greenland, filming lead officer for Dacorum Borough Council, mentioned the Old Town had been “transformed” for Masters of the Air, with “quaint shop fronts … all turned into bombed-out streets and bomb shelters”.

“I call it Hemelwood,” she mentioned of the town.

As somebody who had the pleasure/misfortune of rising up on this explicit pocket of the Hertfordshire commuter belt – which has the main accolade of boasting the second largest magic roundabout in Britain – I learn this unlikeliest of portmanteaus with a disbelief that bordered on hysteria.

Hemelwood. I can image it now – a sweeping shot that takes all of it in. Instead of the opening scene of La La Land, the place the solid begins dancing throughout a site visitors jam on an LA freeway, we see skilled performers chassé-ing their method down the A141 twin carriageway previous the Holiday Inn. The pool social gathering in the Hollywood Hills the place Emma Stone bumps into Ryan Gosling is switched for the Everyone Active Leisure Centre – home to an indoor and out of doors pool, and host of the a lot sought-after Aqua Run Pool Inflatable Parties. The film studio lot the place Stone works as a barista? Swap it out for the majestic Hemel industrial property, the place I used to queue each morning in the faculty holidays to see if I’d be fortunate sufficient to snag a shift pricing up garments in the Next warehouse. Oh, the pleasure of the kimble tagging gun-induced RSI of a night! It was a whirlwind of pure, unadulterated glamour.

And actually, who wants the Griffith Observatory when you’ve got Frogmore Paper Mill, the world’s oldest mechanised paper mill, that includes key reveals corresponding to a scale mannequin of Port Sunlight paper machine, two Fourdrinier paper machines (from 1895 and 1902 respectively), an Nineties hearth pump and a variety of recycled reams? It’s at the moment closed to guests after a hearth in 2022 however is on account of reopen to a lot fanfare this summer time.

In truth, talking of fires: the town has been the real-life setting of at the least one motion movie-worthy story. Back in 2005, Hemel hit headlines throughout Europe after a large explosion and subsequent hearth at an oil storage facility off the M1. I’m not even being snarky right here: information stories described the incident as the largest of its type in peacetime Europe. The explosion measured 2.4 on the Richter scale – which explains why I had some fairly vivid desires of being in an earthquake that evening. The “based on a true story” function movie is simply begging to be made, starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as the solely man who noticed it coming – and the solely man who can douse the flames.

But again to actuality. The irony is that Hemel does make a superb filming location for one excellent purpose: its very ordinariness is its promoting level. Not each movie or sequence wants extravagantly expansive Lord of the Rings-style landscapes à la New Zealand, or the huge desertscapes of Dune. Plenty of our favorite reveals are set in unremarkable locations – that’s half of the allure. After all, After Life’s primary character, Tony Johnson, couldn’t very nicely roll his eyes at the banality of the tales he’s pressured to cowl as a reporter for the native rag if he was primarily based in some sun-bleached slice of the US, may he?

And, proving that individuals will do absolutely anything if it’s associated to this enterprise we name present, Hemel’s transient time in the highlight has even attracted vacationers to the space, say native companies. “We’ve had quite a lot of people say they’ve come to visit after seeing After Life, from as far as Ireland, Germany and America,” Sue Heaslip, who works at the Old Town’s Tea Tree tearooms, informed the BBC. I felt, towards all odds, a twinge of delight upon studying that. I simply hope Sue’s pointing them in the path of the leisure centre. And Frogmore Paper Mill. I wouldn’t need them to overlook out on Hemelwood’s finest and brightest sights…