The Downton Abbey Village of Bampton: Documentary featuring Hugh Bonneville

[Music] hello that and welcome to the Cotswolds Explorer I'm Robin chakra and rosbridge is a nicer day and to be found in Bampton now we're here because just a few days ago the first Downton Abbey movie was released and we're here to show you exactly how Bampton was involved in that movie we're going to show you around the church where Matthew Crawley and Mary were married Jesus was dumped at the altar we're going to show you the house where Isabelle Crawley lived for all those years a house which was also used as the greenroom for the actors during the filming of the series behind me is the post office of Downton and on my left the old grammar school which of course was the Cottage Hospital in dungeon alley and this is the field where we see Lord Grantham talking about the future development of the village it's also the field in which the cast through a wrap party for the villages of Bampton at the end of the TV series so how did it all begin in 2008 Donald woods a leading film designer just finished a series for the BBC called Cranford to find the location for this series he and his staff had scoured the countryside of southwest England looking for the perfect village eventually ending up in Leacock now a new costume series was planned for ITV written by Julian Fellowes called Downton Abbey it was to be set in Yorkshire and the main house had already been chosen as Highclere Castle Donal knew that he'd visited almost all the potential locations in the region was bemoaning the fact that it would be extremely difficult to find another village that would meet his criteria he needed somewhere that was built of stone matching as closely as possible that of Yorkshire and which would also look as though it could convincingly be the village built up around the castle perhaps his most challenging requirement was a village that would not need him to close down any businesses whilst filming all film companies are extremely sensitive to the fact that disruption during filming must be kept to a minimum he needed a place that had two distinct centres one of which was unencumbered by shops and had a church sufficiently grande for His purposes like many people over the centuries he'd never found Bampton it's not an accident that he used to be called Bampton in the bush but the person told me the speaking was the country's most distinguished television film producer Dame pepper Harris who happened to live here she suggested he might like to have a look at bouncing within a week he was here with his team and it looked as though he'd found the perfect place the church close was quiet pretty much untouched for centuries easy to close off from traffic separate from the commercial center of the village and all within an hour and a half of high Clair and London on a more practical note it also had an enormous parking space at the Recreation Ground where the fleet of lorries canteens and buses that always come with a film crew could base themselves and an enthusiastic parish council who would work with him to facilitate their needs television costume drama at the time was on the wane no one expected Downton to be more than one series long but they were delighted to have found their location and said about the planning and then in 2009 the filming of series 1 with enjoyment little did they or indeed Pippa Harris know that this was to become the biggest television phenomenon of all time so behind me is the Church of Mary's in bouncing this wonderful church sitting in the middle of its medieval Minster enclosure is one of the joys of our village in the first century AD there was an anglo-saxon religious community here and it's probable that there was a church on the site well before the Norman invasion but the Magnificent Church we see today was largely built in the 12th and 13th centuries it was the scene of all the funerals and weddings both successful and otherwise in Downton and was the only building in babson filmed on the inside the graveyard has been the source of the greatest confusion for the fans of Downton where many visitors have been found searching for the gravestone of met crawley the set builders tell us that it also created the biggest continuity problem having killed off many characters in the war and the flu epidemic there were 11 gravestones and memorials they had to get in exactly the same place for each series when setting up Sybil's tomb for a shoot towards the end of the series they heard an American visitor say to her husband I told you she was buried here only for her to be dumbfounded when two burly set builders picked it up and moved it two feet to the left church gatehouse was the home of the Crawley family throughout the series and whilst all the filming of the house was from the outside the house itself was used as a greenroom for the stars there's many a tale of jollity and fun including some very exciting antics in the swimming pool about which the village is sworn to secrecy the owner of the house was surprised the summer to find a stranger walking around in her garden and when she approached the visitor she was amazed to be asked if she bought the house from the Crawley family there is a serious blurring of reality and fiction around this series that has touched so deeply the lives of so many the old Grammar School found fame as the Danton cottage hospital this lovely 17th century building was gifted to the village as a free school by one robert veissy a local landowner whose reputation has taken a bit of a beating recently research into his life by the oxford academic professor peter McCulloch suggests he wasn't quite the good-natured wool merchant we'd always thought him to be but we don't hold it against him we've raised a great deal of money over the last few years for the restoration of this building in a campaign supported by Hugh Bonneville who made a short film for us to introduce the project this is the Downton cottage hospital where Lady Sybil helped dr. Clarkson treat recuperating soldiers during the First World War and where mrs. Hughes came when she feared she might be seriously ill thanks to the tireless work of our huge team of volunteers we've successfully restored the roof of the building and we're doing well towards raising the huge sums needed for the replacement of the staircase and the reopening of the top floor once finished will be a permanent exhibition of the filming of Downton and Banton along with other exhibitions and events with the help and generosity of the many visitors from all over the world have come here to visit Banton and those who will come in the future we're confident of success the other small buildings vital to the plot are the two pubs and the post office transformed into their new roles by the addition of a few props signs and seats for the pubs and posters and a pillar box for the post office just recently Hugh Bonneville revisited bouncing with BBC radio to record a documentary on the locations of Downton and we had an interesting conversation just to set the scene where we are we're outside the church which obviously I visited quite frequently when we were filming here it was rather wonderful when you were here because the place was empty of cars its life goes on in the village like this and it's so it's a busy place but of course nowadays we have a lot of visitors as well as a result of your being here so we're now heading out of the church through the church gate and we've got Church gatehouse on the right up ahead of us is the old school this this building of course featured as the the Cottage Hospital in in the show it was built in in 17th century by a man called Robert VZ who we always used to think was a rather wonderful wool merchant and generous man but recent research has two medicines cover that he was actually something of a rogue oh he was a moneylender but we we don't mind he gave us his money and he built this lovely building we're standing outside now and he says I mean a Benton library on one side and Bampton archive and Vaizey room so it has a dual function at the moment it does and we'll continue to do so it is where our library is based the village library is thriving and extremely valuable to the village and that will always remain here but also it'll have a for a while anyway a permanent exhibition of the filming of Downton Abbey in Bampton which draws people from all over the world and so we will give us a much increased tourism offering once once it's finished leads us nicely onto talking about the impact of filming not just Downton but other you know other projects that may or may not of the films here over the years it obviously can bring in tourism which can be a good thing the bus gets stuck people can't park can't get to their houses there must be a downside to the other side it continues and the the tourist numbers grow even now they're growing even though the series finished quite a long time ago the projections are that we will go on having you know tens of thousands of visitors every year ten years of family yes we had we had certainly twenty-seven thousand I think it was that came through this shop last year so it's become I mean Duncan is one of the most extraordinary phenomena in this business ever and it's worldwide as a map here we're looking at so there's a map of the world with little pins and people presumably when they visit they can stick in with country they're from wherever they're from so we're looking at well there's quite a lot in Southeast Australia lot from New Zealand lot from Perth a lot from interesting Lee really quite a lot from China India South Africa and those were mostly during the course of the latter half of last year and of course is a huge American contingent but also South American yeah and this year I mean just started but as you can see this very much this is brand new map for this oh that was last year that was all one year gosh so okay so a huge map from America a lot from Europe a lot from the Far East and a huge amount from as I say south southeast Australia so this year already you've got yes in the United States is populating quite nicely got some from Brazil they're from Australia Taiwan Japan oh well it does of course had its drawbacks some of the coaches are one thing and that is done to us to find a solution to that problem they'll come in we have to accept the fact that it's happening and that is you know something that this village is constantly talking about but also facilities I mean not to put too fine a point on it when people arrive in that sort of numbers you need Lou and you need all kinds of things these are not things that this villager was prepared for bouncing and that was known as bouncing in the bush and for a good reason because it's almost impossible to get to and aren't he everybody came here you know nobody came here but now it has become clear that we're gonna have to do something about that so you could say that's a downside but I'm not sure that that's necessarily right I think in fact what is happening to bouncing his in the long run going to turn out to be extremely beneficial well I suppose so yes in a longer term because when we when we filmed here we parked up at the the sports field and we just outside town and then then got bust in in either cars or small mini buses so I think the the problems of having 49 seaters clogging out the lanes we know wasn't something we quite anticipated either I have to say that we all have a sort of proprietorial feeling about Downton Abbey and indeed about the cast you know if you wanted to run this village you'd get an awful lot of high Hugh's but not a lot of sort of pestering well do you remember in our final visit of the main TV show we had a fantastic barbecue and so on and straw bales everywhere and a good cider bar he set out on the field at the back there so that was a nice fair well it was an absolutely wonderful evening and yeah being being served burgers and wine by by you guys who's you know what's funny and there are a lot of sort of photographic evidence of that it's the archive is full of that the early part of the evening anyway yes it was a very jolly event now as I say we have a we have a very fun feeling about it all but the managing of it is a grown-up business and there's no tourists and we're gonna have to do a certain amount of that as time goes by Robin thank you I'm going to move on to the post office as it was in the in the show which is actually called corner cottage is that right that's right and it's literally 30 yards from where we sitting if you would like to hear the full program you can find it on the BBC sands app during the TV series the crew came to Babson about twice a year the day before filming was to begin the set builders arrived a crew of brilliant carpenters electricians and artists whose job it was to take the it's back in time as we have seen the village made little in the way of difficulty when he came to removing signs of the 20th century despite many efforts by that band of people whose time is spent looking for faults there were very few incidents of wayward television aerials modern building materials and so on one did claim to have seen the yellow lines on the road but since it's never been yellow lines in the square that seems unlikely the pillar box next to the post office was an opportunistic success the grim reality of a dog poo bin was transformed into a stone pillar so realistic that people were seen posting letters through the slot only for them to drop amongst the mess below wires electric trunking modern guttering any sign at all of the modern world was covered up and the church coasts were treated 150 years in a single day as the series progressed more and more things had to be reproduced the war memorial plaques on the walls the pub signs all had to be exactly the same as before and as we've already seen the graveyard was particularly challenging but the time series six came to an end the crew and cast of Downton have become familiar figures in bouncing many of the crew had made friends in the village over the years and the stars could be sure of a warm but unate receive welcome from the villagers it's true that such was the phenomenal success of Downton the village filled up with paparazzi whenever the crew were here and security had to be a little tighter than it was at the beginning but it was always an open set and the villagers and their friends as well as the visitors who timed it well were able to watch every step of the filming when the end came it was slightly sad we don't use to the sight of these stars walking the streets and some of us felt as if we were part of this extraordinary phenomenon the generosity with which the cast and crew threw a party for the village on their last night suggests that they felt at least slightly the same way it was a great deal of fun being served a glass of wine and a hamburger by Lord Grantham himself with mrs. Pat lor bustling around in the background in September 2019 the film of Downton was released the crew had returned for a two-day visit but somehow it wasn't quite the same the scale of the thing was huge by comparison many of the familiar people in the crew were not there and the stars were hustled on set in limousines keen to avoid the by now huge numbers of photographers the weather was extremely unkind the wind blew a gale and the filming was done mainly inside the church and in the gardens of church gate house out of sight of the crowds we now know that at least one of the scenes filled on that day had to be reshot later at Highclere Castle we know however that Banton's place in the firmament of film locations is firmly established and we can expect the pleasure of visitors from every corner of the globe for many years to come so we'll leave you in this beautiful Sanford field the site of our wonderful barbecue with the cast of Downton Abbey we hope that they might come back one day and you never know they may be filming in this field once again we hope you've enjoyed our little tour around Bantam and we'll see you in the depths of the Cotswolds in the very near future [Music]

Channel: The Cotswold Explorer

Views: 162,477

Rating: 4.9469633 out of 5

Keywords: Downton Abbey Bampton, Downton Abbey, Hugh Bonneville, Bampton, Bampton Oxfordshire, Downton, Bampton Downton, Where is Bampton, Downton Abbey Filming Locations, The Cotswold Explorer, Cotswolds, Oxfordshire

Id: XILms3Do21s

Length: 17min 37sec (1057 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 21 2019