In 2017 Gurinder Chadha went back to Sutton Square in Heston, the green she had filmed sixteen years earlier as the street outside Jess's family home. A group of young lads came up and asked whether she knew this was the house where Bend It Like Beckham was shot. She nodded. People like her came to take photographs all the time, one of them told her, and offered to take one of her.
9
places on the route
The story is set in Hounslow, and the filming happened around it and as far away as Hamburg. Switch regions with the buttons above, and click a point to jump to its entry.
They had the right house. The town is the part the film borrows. The Bhamras live in Hounslow and the team is the Hounslow Harriers, and the addresses that can be checked run out of the town in every direction. The park where Jess and Jules meet is in Hayes. The sari shopping is on Southall Broadway. The wedding is a Rothschild mansion at Gunnersbury, the training pitch stood in Yeading and has been pulled down, and the match against the German side was played in Hamburg. Sutton Square comes closest of all of them: inside the borough of Hounslow, a kilometre from the station in the middle of the town, and still not the town.
Shooting began in June 2001 and ran about nine weeks, three days of that in Germany, with part of the picture made at Shepperton Studios.
The outside of the Bhamra house. Sutton Square is a long green with a road running round it and gabled semis facing in from all sides, several of them dressed in mock-Tudor timber.
Chadha named the square in a 2017 interview, as the place where they shot the exteriors of Jess's family home, and stopped there. She named the street and no more. People live in those houses.
In the same interview she said someone ought to run a tour of the locations and finish it with a curry in Southall. That tour would start in the borough of Hounslow and spend the rest of its day outside it.
The early football with Jess and her friends, and the scene where Jess and Jules meet.
The park is three and a half miles north-west of Sutton Square, in another borough. Hillingdon council owns it, and the same twenty acres carry two films: the football outdoors, in the park, and Chocolat indoors, in Barra Hall itself.
Barra Hall is a grade-two listed manor house, and it was the town hall of Hayes and Harlington before the council moved out to Uxbridge. It came out of a renovation in October 2005 as a children's centre. The park around it has a bandstand, an open-air theatre and a playground.
The Harriers' training pitch was a mile and a half away. It is not there now.
Nothing from the production names this ground. Two groundhoppers do. One walked it clockwise from the turnstiles towards the end of the 2006-07 season, photographing as he went; the other had been once, in April 1995, and came back on a non-matchday in June 2005 to get the pictures he had missed. Justin Martin went out there in November 2015, not long after seeing the stage musical, and found a large new stadium going up, the terraced end moved in, and rubble where he remembered Jess scoring her winner. The dugout you see in the film, he said, is the old one, from before the new ones went in.
The Warren was Yeading F.C.'s ground, just off Springfield Road, a little over half a mile from Southall Broadway. A hundred seats under a low stand, later stretched to 250 to meet grading rules, covered terracing along one side, the rest of it open, and room for 3,500 by the end. Yeading merged with Hayes in 2007, the ground fell out of use, and the SkyEx Community Stadium opened on the same site in 2016. A single terrace of the old ground is still standing, outside the new stadium, behind one goal.
Two football films used this pitch in one year. The prison match that carries Mean Machine was shot at The Warren, and that film worked between April and June 2001; this crew arrived in June. Ted Lasso trains A.F.C. Richmond at the ground that stands there now, which is the same site and a different building.
Buying the sari for Pinky's wedding dress, and the Broadway as ordinary background elsewhere in the film.
The Broadway is a kilometre of the Uxbridge Road. Jewellers with the cabinets lit from inside, a musical instrument shop with garlands hanging in the doorway and its stock out on the pavement, sari houses, a bookmaker in between. The signs at the railway station are in English and in Gurmukhi. The distributor's production notes put the story in Southall and west London, where Chadha grew up.
A photograph of the street at dusk in 2005 catches a fire engine coming down the road, headlights on, past shopfronts already lit, and above one of them the name CHADHA'S. It is the director's surname, spelled the same way, over a shop nobody has connected to her.
Pinky's wedding, and Paula Paxton turning up at it to confront Jess.
The Large Mansion stands on the seam where the borough of Hounslow meets Ealing's. Nathan Mayer Rothschild bought it in 1835, shortly before he died, and the family held it until 1925, when the estate went to the councils of Ealing and Acton on condition that it be used for leisure and recreation, save for houses along Popes Lane and Lionel Road to help repay the loan. It has been the borough museum since 1929, and a four-year restoration finished in June 2018.
The mansion still lets itself for weddings, and the boroughs' own advertising for it tells you not to crash one there the way Juliet Stevenson does in the film. Gunnersbury's own filming page offers production companies its formal rooms and nearly two hundred acres of parkland, and names no film at all.
Across the river, in Surrey
Molesey F.C., Walton Road
Molesey F.C., Walton Road — the clubhouse with its suspended seating
A non-league ground between the Thames and Hampton Court, five and a half miles south of Heston and four from Shepperton.
Molesey bought the site before the 1953-54 season, and in 1960 Stanley Rous opened a clubhouse along the touchline: a glazed upper floor with a deck of seats hung out over the pitch, straight above the dugouts.
In 2016 Jack Peat picked Walton Road for a round-up of London's best non-league grounds, on the strength of that deck, which he recognised from the film.
Hamburg: three days, one minute
The production notes give the German trip three days and put the semi-final in it. Lutz Granert, writing up the city's film addresses for a Hamburg magazine in 2018, put the German sequence at barely a minute of film: a boat trip on the Binnenalster, an arrival at the Hotel Steigenberger and a match at the small stadium on Hagenbeckstraße. The Harriers lose it. Jess misses from the spot and the German side wins.
The boat trip. The Binnenalster is the smaller, inner basin of the Alster, about eighteen hectares of water in the middle of the city, with the Jungfernstieg along its south-west bank and the white excursion boats leaving from the quay there. A fountain has stood on a floating pontoon in the middle of it since 1987, throwing water up to sixty metres; it is shut off for the winter and replaced at Christmas by a lit tree. The buildings round the water are held to a regulation of their own: copper roofs, and no advertising on the façades.
The arrival at the hotel. Hamburg has had more than one Steigenberger house. The one that carries the city's name stands on the Fleetinsel, brick and glass at the Heiligengeistbrücke over the Alsterfleet, half a mile from the Binnenalster and a few minutes' walk from the Michel.
The match against the German side, on a municipal ground on Hagenbeckstraße in Stellingen, a few hundred metres south of the Hagenbeck zoo.
Jürgen Hitsch, who runs SV Grün-Weiß Eimsbüttel, told Granert that the club had supplied a great many of the spectators and, above all, players from its women's section, and that the club was not so much as mentioned in the credits. The club's women had gone up to the Regionalliga Nord the year before.
When the crew used it, the ground was the Wolfgang-Meyer-Sportanlage, the name the pitches had carried since September 1934. In 2022 the district took the name off, after research set out how close Meyer had stood to the National Socialist direction of school policy in Hamburg. A jury of local politicians and of the clubs that use the site, and then the district assembly, settled on Sportpark Eimsbüttel, out of names the public had put forward.
The district has been rebuilding the ground. The stands those spectators sat in are being replaced by new ones for about 1,500 people. The grass the two sides played on is staying where it is.
