Netflix Is Running Free Walking Tours in an Elaborate and Weird Marketing Stunt

If you like seeing the sights of a city in walking tour format rather than on a Segway like a fun person, you’re spoiled for choice in London.

There are walking tours exclusively organized around the crime scenes of Jack the Ripper; tours navigating the city’s alcohol-logged history via a series of crusty old pubs; and there are even tours exclusively given over to places associated with a single beloved character of English literature like James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, or Harry Potter.

But this summer, for this week only, if your Netflix binge on the flight over wasn’t enough for you, you can attend a two-hour tour in London, Madrid, or Paris linking places seen in Netflix TV shows and movies. But are they any good?

Like lunches, walking tours are never really free. In this case, what you’re essentially taking part in is an extremely elaborate, immersive advertisement for Netflix. The website for the London tour even menacingly threatens that attendees will “learn about the history of Netflix in the U.K. over the last 10 years” during the experience—but the corporate propagandizing is kept to a merciful minimum. Before the tour starts, everyone in the group is invited to say where they are from and what their favorite Netflix show is (spare a thought for the one tourist who, in front of other human beings and with countless alternative choices available, voluntarily admits that theirs is The Big Bang Theory). Later, when we stop at the Lyceum Theatre, which since 1999 has hosted Disney’s stage musical adaptation of The Lion King, our guide cheerily informs us that Disney would only allow Netflix to film the outside of the theater, which serves as the stand-in for several other theaters in The Crown. But those asides aside, there’s thankfully not much in the way of things you’d imagine someone at Netflix HQ ordered the guide to include.

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The tour promises an “exclusive behind-the-scenes look at some of your all-time favorite films and shows on Netflix, including The Crown, Bridgerton, Enola Holmes, and Anatomy of a Scandal.” It starts on the Mall, the half-mile road—colored to resemble a red carpet—which unrolls from Trafalgar Square at one end to the towering black and gold gates of Buckingham Palace at the other. We actually start outside Lancaster House, a neo-classical mansion commissioned in the early 19th century by the Grand Old Duke of York, who is now best remembered in the nursery rhyme for ordering futile military maneuvers. But the reason we’re here is because the interior of Lancaster House resembles that of its neighboring Buckingham Palace, and as such was frequently used by The Crown as a stand-in for the queen’s residence. Well, former residence—the queen decided to permanently ditch Buckingham Palace for Windsor Castle earlier this year—but still. The tour group isn’t actually allowed inside Lancaster House to see the famed interiors; instead, we’re handed laminated print-outs of scenes from the show when Lancaster House’s rooms appeared on screen.

The Mall itself was the location of some memorable scenes in The Crown, we’re told. Emma Corrin’s Princess Diana lolled her head out of the window of a taxi as she contemplated the royal life ahead of her early in Season Four. It’s also where you’ll find a statue of Queen Elizabeth II’s father, George VI, who became king after his older brother, Edward VIII, abdicated after less than a year on the throne to marry the divorced American socialite Wallis Simpson. The unveiling of the statue of George VI—an event which took place in 1955, three years after his death—was recreated in the first season of The Crown (although in the show, our guides assures us, the statue resembles Mad Men star Jared Harris, who plays George VI, rather than the man himself). When we learn George VI’s wife, the Queen Mother, lived till the ripe old age of 101, one tourist asks: “What were they feeding her?” Gin and Dubonnet for about seven hours every day, our guide answers. More print-outs, disappointingly showing the statue of George VI instead of a seriously inebriated Queen Mother.

From there we walk to the nearby Reform Club, a gentleman’s club (not a euphemism) which fomented radical politics and once counted august figures like Winston Churchill, E.M. Forster, and H.G. Wells among its members. But we’re here to find out that it was used in Paddington as the headquarters of the Geographer’s Guild, itself a fictional society likely based on the real Royal Geographical Society. The Reform is also the place where Phileas Fogg begins and ends his circumnavigation of the globe in Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days. But most importantly for our purposes, it’s where Viscount Bridgerton meets the Duke of Hastings to discuss the latter’s return to society in the first episode of Bridgerton.

Bridgerton also has a connection with another stop on our tour, St James’s Church, Piccadilly, which was designed by Sir Christopher Wren, the architect of St Paul’s Cathedral, one of London’s most famous landmarks. St James’s stood in for Queen Charlotte’s chapel during Viscount Bridgerton’s disastrous wedding with Edwina Sharma. Two minutes’ walk away is the Royal Academy of Arts, which our guide disappointingly informs us wasn’t really “orgy central” as it’s depicted in Bridgerton. We also pass Her Majesty’s Theatre, owned by Andrew Lloyd Webber, where Princess Diana really filmed herself singing “All I Ask of You” from “Phantom of the Opera” as an excruciatingly unwelcome anniversary gift for Prince Charles. In the latest season of The Crown, Emma Corrin used the same stage playing Diana playing Christine Daaé to recreate the moment.

We then head to Leicester Square, where you’ll find British movie premieres taking place and an inexplicably popular M&Ms store. It’s also home to several statues depicting treasured British movie characters like Mary Poppins and Harry Potter—neither of which belong in the Netflix stable—and Clifford the Big Red Dog, who is neither British nor a Netflix character, but gets a mention on the tour all the same. Then we move on through to Covent Garden, the West End’s fashionable piazza which was once famed for its flower market and is now known for its street entertainers and wildly expensive beer. But we’re here because its Victorian iteration is featured in Enola Holmes, the 2020 Netflix film starring Stranger Things actress Millie Bobby Brown as Sherlock’s teenage sister. Apparently the market’s iconic design didn’t quite cut the mustard to represent itself on screen, however, with the colonnades at Greenwich’s Old Royal Naval College being used instead.

The tour ends with another scene of excruciating embarrassment for poor old Princess Diana. On the Strand, Australia House—the Australian embassy in London—was used for the scene of an agonizing lunch between Diana and her love rival Camilla before Diana’s marriage to Charles. The real lunch took place in a now-closed restaurant that was really called Menage à Trois, famed for exclusively serving starters and deserts. Oh, and Australia House’s lobby was also used as the goblin-run Gringotts Wizarding Bank in the first Harry Potter movie—but you’ll have to spend nearly $60 to see the set itself at the Warner Bros dedicated Harry Potter studio tour about 15 miles outside central London.

Of course, there are loads of London shooting locations in Netflix series that you’re just not going to get around to in a two-hour walking tour. Hampstead is home to some of the streets seen in the Ricky Gervais series After Life; head to Hackney if you want to see the real places behind Top Boy; and Millennium Bridge memorably featured in the very first episode of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror. But considering it’s free, the tour is definitely worth going to for hardcore TV fans—especially if you’re into Bridgerton and The Crown. But if you’re going on the tour to learn about London itself, you might just be better off plumping for that crusty pub tour instead.

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