Manchester streets transformed into London as huge film set descends on town

The streets of Manchester have been transformed by a huge film set this week, with street signs and posters subtly transforming the city centre into London.

The area surrounding Spring Gardens is at the heart of the filming, with scenes being shot in the dead of night this week.

Film crews are working on a new Channel 4 thriller from the creators behind hit shows like Top Boy, Mobland, and The Day Of The Jackal.

Army of Shadows will star major names like Kit Harrington, Paddy Considine, and Olivia Colman, along with Susan Sarandon, America Ferrera, and Alex Hassell.

While filming is mostly taking place after dark, traces of the film sets have been left in Manchester today – including red phone boxes, Greater London Police signs, and posters of a fictitious resistance movement.

And there are several road closures in place, including Chancery Place, Chancery Lane, Brown Street, Booth Street, Kennedy Street, and parts of Tib Lane and Clarence Street.

In a note shared to local residents and businesses, StudioCanal said the scenes being filmed in Manchester involve ‘a group of people running through the streets putting up posters on properties’.

According to Channel 4, the new drama is inspired by Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1969 film and Joseph Kessel’s seminal book of the same name, which dramatised the emergence of the French Resistance to the Nazi Occupation of France during World War 2.

Army of Shadows is a ‘bold new story’ from Ronan Bennett of how resistance takes shape in an occupied Great Britain.

The show summary says: “Britain looks almost normal, but the flags are different, the news is careful, and nobody says certain things out loud anymore. But everyone can feel it. Somewhere beneath the surface of ordinary life something has gone terribly, quietly wrong.

“Out of the shadows emerges a former soldier known only as Berry, who starts building a secret resistance network. He knows one thing above all else: don’t act before you’re ready.

“An unlikely group starts to coalesce around him – people who’ve decided they can’t look away any longer: a soldier, a student, a radiographer, a journalist. Ordinary people, with ordinary lives, making an extraordinary and irreversible choice.

“Against them: a state with unlimited reach, a ruthless minister who’ll do whatever it takes to maintain “order”, and an American intelligence operative called Jessie, who is very, very good at her job.”

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Featured image: The Manc Group