The latest Amazon and BBC co-production, Good Omens, recently premiered on Prime Video to great critical praise and even more anticipation from fans of the story and its characters, born from the minds of English authors Terry Pratchett (creator of the Discworld series) and Neil Gaiman (author of American Gods and Stardust, just to name a couple of titles).
Good Omens tells the story of an angel, Aziraphale (played by Michael Sheen) and a demon, Crowley (played by David Tennant) who have been living on Earth ever since its creation and have grown too attached to it to let it be destroyed in the Armageddon Heaven and Hell so desperately want— and have meticulously organised, save for displacing the Antichrist at the very last minute.
If you’ve loved the six episodes of the mini-series and would love to plan a little Good Omens-inspired tour, these are the locations where the adventures of Aziraphale and Crowley were filmed— of course, as one might expect, most of them are in the United Kingdom.
London is where both Crowley and Aziraphale live, the former in a modern apartment filled with terrorised houseplants and the latter in his antique bookshop in Soho. According to Atlas of Wonders, the headquarters of Heaven and Hell can also be accessed from London— the entrance was filmed in the main hall of Broadgate Tower, while the Sky Garden restaurant was used for the squeaky clean Heaven headquarters.
Other locations around London make their appearance on the series as themselves— St. James’ Park, where Crowley and Aziraphale discuss their secret friendship meeting like two secret service agents; the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs of Bromley are where the two keep an eye on the wrong Antichrist; Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre is where Crowley and Aziraphale perform a small miracle to make even Shakespeare’s “more gloomy ones” a huge success in the 17th century. The bandstand that is Crowley and Aziraphale’s “fourth alternative rendezvous” can be found in Battersea Park, on the south bank of the river Thames.
The fictional village of Tadfield in Oxfordshire, where the true Antichrist lives, was played in the series by the picturesque village of Hambleden in Buckinghamshire. Hogback Wood, where Adam and his friends, the Them, play all day, is in real life Painshill Park in Cobham, Surrey. The Tadfield Air Base where the end of the world is supposed to start is actually a semi-abandoned RAF airbase in Upper Heyford, Oxfordshire.
Of course, Crowley and Aziraphale have been on Earth ever since it was created and have visited several places, especially during the most important moments of human history— they were in Jerusalem and Ancient Rome and Paris, even though not all of these scenes were filmed on location. Most of the scenes taking place in a warmer climate than the English one were shot around Cape Town in South Africa, including the scenes in Imperial Rome, the ones at the fields of Megiddo, where Armageddon is supposed to go down, and the ones at the very beginning of the time in the Garden of Eden.
The only question left is, have you watched Good Omens already?
