About a Boy | Woodbridge Chapel — where the invented son was born

SPAT: Single Parents Alone Together. Will invents a two-year-old boy called Ned, buys a child's car seat to leave in the back of the car as evidence, and walks into a support group looking for women who will be, as he calculates it, vulnerable and grateful. The scene was shot at Woodbridge Chapel, a small brick hall down Hayward's Place, just off Woodbridge Street, ten minutes north of the flat the film gave him.

The chapel went up in 1833 as an Independent congregation's meeting house and is Grade II listed. For much of the twentieth century it housed the Clerkenwell and Islington Medical Mission, treating people in this parish who could not pay a doctor. A church congregation uses it today. It is a plain box with round-headed windows and railings out front, the kind of building you walk past without registering.

That plainness is the point. The film's entire deception starts in a room where actual single parents once brought actual problems, and the joke curdles the moment Will meets Suzie and, through her, Marcus. Stand on Hayward's Place with your back to Woodbridge Street and look at the front: no plaque, no film credit, just a working chapel that has been quietly useful for nearly two centuries.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.