Recording a scene for Tooth and Claw (2006) in the library at Tredegar House, with Pauline Collins as Queen Victoria, Derek Riddell as Sir Robert, David Tennant as the Doctor and Billie Piper as Rose.
In 2009, Highclere Castle – a Grade I-listed stately pile near Newbury, the ancestral seat of the Carnarvon clan – was facing literal ruin, in the form of a £12 million repair bill. But along came Carnival Films, asking to use the castle as the principal location for an ITV Sunday-night heritage drama set in a rose-tinted post-Edwardian neverland. Downton Abbey first aired in the UK in September 2010, and in the US from the following year. By 2012, visitor numbers at Highclere had doubled, to over 1,200 per day, bolstered by whole coachloads of foreign tourists – ‘set-jetters’, as they’re known. From nowhere, Highclere had become a major tourist attraction.
The so-called ‘Downton effect’ has been recorded elsewhere, of course – including at Tredegar House, a late 17th-century mansion near Newport, once the home of the Morgan mining dynasty. Doctor Who first called upon Tredegar to provide Rocket Group interiors for The Christmas Invasion (2005), before giving it a far more prominent role as the Highlands-located Torchwood House in the next year’s Victorianset werewolf thriller, Tooth and Claw. Since then, Cardiff-based Doctor Who has returned to Tredegar time and again – reusing it for parts of (among others) the boarding school in Human Nature/The Family of Blood (2007), the Eddison manor in The Unicorn and the Wasp (2008) and the Naismith residence in The End of Time (2009-10).