Somerset House

Where it sits. Somerset House fills the block between the Strand and the river at the eastern edge of Westminster, with the Courtauld Gallery on the Strand front, King's College London against its east flank and Waterloo Bridge landing beside its south-west corner. Its great courtyard, roughly an acre of open ground once used as a car park for tax officials and now paved, is one of the few large enclosed public spaces in central London that is neither a park nor a square. The building's relationship with the Thames used to be direct: barges came in under the river arches until the Victoria Embankment was driven across the foreshore between 1865 and 1870, leaving the terrace stranded a street's width from the water, with the old watergate arches now looking onto the road.

The story behind it. The site held a Tudor palace built for the Lord Protector, the Duke of Somerset, from 1547. That building was demolished and the present one begun in 1776 to designs by Sir William Chambers, purpose-built to house government offices and learned societies under one roof — an early and deliberate piece of state architecture. The Strand block took the Royal Academy, the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries; the larger ranges took the Navy Board, whose Seamen's Hall and the cantilevered spiral of the Nelson Stair survive. Robert Smirke added the east wing for King's College between 1829 and 1831, and James Pennethorne the New Wing on the west in the 1850s. For over a century the name meant paperwork to most Britons: the General Register Office kept the national indexes of births, marriages and deaths here from 1837, and the Principal Probate Registry held the wills. The Inland Revenue occupied large parts until the 2010s, and the transformation into a cultural site — the Courtauld Gallery arriving in 1989, the courtyard opened to the public in 2000 with its 55 choreographed fountain jets, Somerset House Studios launched in 2016 — is recent.

On screen. Two Bond films used it, in opposite ways. In GoldenEye (1995) the courtyard becomes a square in St Petersburg: with filming time in Russia limited, Martin Campbell dressed the space with Russian vehicles and signage, and it is here that Jack Wade's car breaks down in the middle of what is meant to be a busy Soviet-era roundabout. The neoclassical uniformity of Chambers's elevations, with no visible English street furniture, made the substitution possible. Two years later Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) used the same building as itself — or near enough — as a London ministry, with Bond driving in under the Strand arch. That double life continues elsewhere in the courtyard's filmography: it played Himmler's Berlin headquarters in The Eagle Has Landed (1976), appeared in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) and Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes (2009), in Sleepy Hollow (1999), Shanghai Knights (2003), The Duchess (2008), Last Chance Harvey (2008) and London Has Fallen (2016). The winter ice rink appears in the opening of Love Actually (2003).

What you actually see today. The Fountain Court is the heart of it: 55 jets set flush in the paving, programmed to run in sequences that children treat as a splash park in July, replaced by an ice rink from late November. The Courtauld Gallery in the Strand block holds one of Britain's most concentrated collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting — Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, Van Gogh's self-portrait with bandaged ear, Cézanne's card players — in rooms reopened in 2021 after a long refurbishment. Underneath, the Deadhouse is a vaulted passage lined with monuments salvaged from the Tudor palace chapel. The river terrace, reached through the south range, gives a long view over the Embankment to the South Bank. The New Wing houses studios for more than a hundred artists and makers.

Practical shape of a visit. The courtyard, terrace and Deadhouse are free and open daily; the Courtauld and the temporary exhibition programme are ticketed; skating and the summer film and music series sell out weeks ahead. Step-free access runs throughout the site via the Strand and Embankment entrances, and there are lifts to the gallery floors. Allow an hour for the courtyard and terrace, three if the Courtauld is on the list.

Getting there and timing. Temple station on the District and Circle lines is two minutes' walk; Covent Garden, Charing Cross, Embankment and Waterloo are all within a fifteen-minute walk, and the last of these gives the approach across Waterloo Bridge with the best view of the building's river front. Weekday mornings are quietest. Summer evenings bring concerts to the courtyard; the deep midwinter, with the rink lit and the fountains off, is when the place looks most like its film appearances.