Is this England’s most filmed village?

If a beautiful country village crops up in a British film or television programme, chances are it may be Turville in Buckinghamshire. Set amid the Chiltern Hills, the chocolate box array of wood-beam country cottages, village pub, quaint church and local windmill have made it a haven for filmmaking of many different kinds since before the Second World War. Even today it continues to be a popular filming spot for everything from crime shows to music videos.

As such, the Bucks village may look familiar even to anyone who has never visited. It has turned up in films as diverse as Peter Graham Scott’s smuggling horror Captain Clegg (1962), the same director’s newlywed comedy Father Came Too! (1964), Lone Scherfig’s period coming-of-age drama An Education (2009) and Robert Stromberg’s fantasy blockbuster Maleficent (2014). 

That’s in addition to an endless stream of small-screen roles, including Goodnight Mr Tom (1998), Jonathan Creek (the 2008 special to be precise) and The Vicar of Dibley (1994 to 2000) to name just a few.

Here are five of the most notable films shot in and around Turville, and how the locations look today.

One of the earliest features to be filmed in Turville, Alberto Cavalcanti’s Ealing propaganda film Went the Day Well? dramatises the covert Nazi invasion of a small English village. The film uses extensive locations around the village, especially its church, St Mary the Virgin, which is the first thing we see under the opening credits.

The following shot shows the edge of the pub, which also features throughout the film. Today, the building is still a public house, going under the name of The Bull and Butcher.

Cavalcanti shows a closer shot of the pub’s door with the publican’s name above, though today only fairy lights hang above the entrance.

But there is also now a plaque by the entrance celebrating the pub’s appearance in Cavalcanti’s film, as well as a separate one for its role in an episode of Midsomer Murders.

Later in the film, the village post office becomes a pivotal setting. It’s where one of the film’s starkest moments of violence occurs. However, this building is one of Cavalcanti’s illusions, actually a set constructed just opposite the church. The shot today shows the real view, which looks out onto Turville’s small green. 

Ealing Studios clearly held great affection for Turville, as it often cropped up as a location in their films even when it wasn’t the principal setting. A good example of this is in the studio’s famed portmanteau horror film Dead of Night. 

In the segment ‘The Golfer’s Story’, an H.G. Wells short story provides the inspiration for the film’s comic episode, featuring the comedy duo Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, best known for their double act as the cricket-mad train travellers in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938). 

When Radford’s character is shown getting married, the venue is Turville’s St Mary the Virgin, though he is unfortunately haunted by Wayne’s character, a ghost who cannot remember how to disappear.

It may be surprising to find Turville featuring in Britain’s first prisoner of war film, but several notable English villages actually feature throughout Basil Dearden’s powerful drama. Starring Michael Redgrave, the film uses a Turville location not featured in the other films mentioned here: the Grade II-listed Turville Grange, built in the late 18th century. 

Situated further out of the village itself and towards Turville Heath, the Grange is the house Celia (Rachel Kempson) lives in and where she receives letters from Redgrave’s Dachau escapee. The Grange was famously owned by Lee Radziwill, Jackie Kennedy’s sister, and is preserved today exactly as it was. It’s value is reported at £12.75 million.

A powerful psychodrama about remarriage and infidelity starring Anne Bancroft and Peter Finch, Jack Clayton’s The Pumpkin Eater is a decidedly frosty film whose range of beautiful locations retain a sense of melancholy throughout. Though Clayton does not use a great deal of Turville, he does incorporate a famous location nearby that itself has an exhaustive film history: Cobstone Windmill. 

The characters live in the windmill at various points, so Clayton shoots it from a variety of different perspectives. The windmill looks out over the village, and he shoots the view below looking up at it from inside a building some distance away. Interestingly, the film is based on a novel by Penelope Mortimer and inspired by her tumultuous marriage with writer John Mortimer who himself would end up living in nearby Turville Heath.

Later on, we see the family cycling towards the windmill. Unlike in most other films featuring the windmill, this shot is actually taken on Oxford Road, the road behind the house and windmill, rather than from the country path directly connected to the village.

Another common feature of films using the windmill is to look down onto Turville and its various chocolate box buildings. In this case, the shot is slightly hazy as Clayton slowly zooms down through a window, the shot bookended by two characters as the camera looks through the gap between their bodies.

Perhaps the most famous use of the village is in the children’s film classic Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, scripted by Roald Dahl and directed by Ken Hughes. It shows Turville at its most colourful and picturesque, though the village of the film is really an amalgam of several in the area. The home where inventor Caractacus Potts (Dick Van Dyke) lives with his family is again Cobstone Windmill. We first see the area in a shot looking down onto Turville when Truly Scrumptious (Sally Ann Howes) is driving the children home.

Hughes then cuts to show the windmill and the house, as Truly Scrumptious drives along the path into the garden. Sadly, the property owners have closed off access to the fields surrounding the property, meaning exact shots could not be taken. However, the windmill is still standing and was put on sale in 2023 for £9 million. Its previous owners have included Hayley Mills and her husband, director Roy Boulting. The grass may not have been as green when I visited during winter, but this picture-perfect village location is still as beautiful as it was many decades and many films ago.

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