Downton Abbey | Basildon Park — Grantham House, Forty Miles from London

Rose was presented at court from this house, and there is no London in it at all.

Grantham House, the Crawleys' town address, is Basildon Park: a Palladian mansion standing above the Thames in West Berkshire, roughly forty miles from the Mayfair streets it stands in for. John Carr built it between 1776 and 1783 for Francis Sykes, who had made his fortune in Bengal, and the Bath stone was carted across from Wiltshire.

The rooms used are the ones visitors walk through. The Hall, the Dining Room, the Drawing Room, and the Octagon Room with its three tall windows over the valley. The 2013 Christmas special filmed Rose's coming-out ball here. The series five finale used it again for her wedding to Atticus Aldridge, and nearly every reception room reappears in the final film.

Basildon was very nearly lost. Stripped of fittings, requisitioned in wartime, left derelict and roofless in places by 1950. It survives because Lord and Lady Iliffe bought it in 1952 and spent two decades putting it back room by room, buying back the very doorcases and plasterwork that had been sold off. The National Trust holds it now, and location fees feed straight into conservation.

Carry this away: the most convincingly aristocratic London house in the series is a rescued ruin in Berkshire.

Photo: Rod Allday, Geograph Britain and Ireland, CC BY-SA 2.0.