It’s a particular condition of Londoners that, when watching any kind of fictional telly set in our city, we can’t help but notice the glaring inaccuracies that are inevitably made. It’s surely the same for New Yorkers, whose city famously features more than any other in film and TV. Or the Parisiennes forced to sit through Emily In Paris’ caricature of the City of Light.
When I heard series four of You was going to take place in London – despite having been deceptively lead to believe it would be set in Paris at the end of series three – I was excited. I was excited for the continuation of the series anyway, it being one of my favourite of Netflix’s ongoing offerings, but I’d so enjoyed how both New York and Los Angeles had been almost characters themselves in series one and two that I was looking forward to seeing what producers did with London.
A big part of protagonist Joe Goldberg’s narrative is that he is an Anonymous Loner in a big city (thus allowing him to commit his heinous crimes unnoticed) which it’s certainly possible to be here in London. And while I’ve by no means hated what they’ve done with the place, as always, there are a LOAD of things they’ve got so wrong about London, which make it just that little bit grating to watch. If you’re as much of a geographical nit-picker as I am, you’ll need to brace yourself for this.
Joe’s uni is CLEARLY not in London
It only takes a passing glance for anyone who’s ever even visited London to see that the sprawling green spaces of the university where Joe (now known as Jonathan Moore) is apparently lecturing are NOT in London. The closest thing London has to campus unis is the area around Bloomsbury, an elite postcode of the West End which is home to colleges of six London-based universities, including UCL and SOAS. The student-heavy population and large percentage of university buildings – although, think more grey brutalism than dark academia – certainly give the area a ‘campus-y’ feel, but actual campus unis we have not. I personally think the area would have made an even better location for Joe’s stint as a lecturer, and definitely would have made a whole lot more sense.
Filming actually took place at the University of London’s Royal Holloway college, in Surrey.
Joe’s commute home from work is completely ridiculous
Now that we know Joe’s uni is actually in an entirely different county, it’s obviously preposterous that he should be walking home from work. But let’s suspend our disbelief for a moment. It seems producers intended for the fictional university to be set somewhere in East London because, when Joe sets off on his walk home, his journey begins in Spitalfields Market, close to Liverpool Street station. As an Anonymous Loner in the City (ALC), in one of his trademark internal monologues, Joe expresses that he doesn’t mind ‘the walk’. Cut to him walking through the affluent residential streets of South Kensington, a mooch that would take him just shy of two hours. Sure, not impossible, but who’s going to take a two hour walk as their chosen mode of transport, over the perfectly good District and Circle lines that would get him home in a fraction of the time? In fact, four episodes in and I’ve yet to see him use any public transport at all, save for one black cab journey he actually could have easily walked. I’m starting to think this man doesn’t even own an Oyster Card.
As Time Out London point out, given that his uni is actually in Surrey, the journey home via Spitalfields and the West End would be around 30 miles and would take around 15 hours.
Can we talk about Joe’s mews flat?
We’ve seen it done many times before, haven’t we? American filmmakers are obsessed with the picturesque London mews, originally built at the back of large homes in affluent areas of London as servants’ quarters. So charming! So quaint! So… London. Except as anyone who lives in the capital knows, these are some of the most sought-after homes in the city and can easily cost multiple millions of pounds. Kynance Mews, where Joe purportedly lives, is a stone's throw from Kensington Palace (yes, home to the future King and Queen of England) and one of the best maintained and most photographed mews in the area, if not the whole of London. A three-bed house currently on sale on the street is listed at £3,650,000. That a university lecturer, for whom the average salary is currently just above £40k, should live there is nothing short of outrageous. It pissed me off when 20something newlyweds Juliet and Peter did it in Love Actually back in 2003, and it pisses me off now.
Routemasters don't exist anymore
Last one - both the series artwork and scenes in the series show a London teeming with regal red routemasters, the iconic London double decker buses that are as synonymous with the city as black cabs. Sadly, routemasters almost completely disappeared from London roads way back in 2005, with only the 9 and 15 running through central London as 'heritage routes' up until they too were retired in 2021. I can't help but feel Joe is just rubbing salt in the wound at this point.