Welcome to British Isles Friday! British Isles Friday is a weekly event for sharing all things British and Irish - reviews, photos, opinions, trip reports, guides, links, resources, personal stories, interviews, and research posts. Join us each Friday to link your British and Irish themed content and to see what others have to share. The link list is at the bottom of this post. Pour a cup of tea or lift a pint and join our link party!
Last week, I reviewed a book about Oscar Wilde's two-day visit to St. Louis. Tina talked about recent books she's read that were set in Ireland and on Shetland Island.
We meet Lucy Carlyle just as she is setting out on her career as a ghost hunter. When things go badly, she ends up in London with no job and no place to stay. She finds both at Lockwood & Co, a ghost investigative agency run by two other teens. Can they do better than the adult-run agencies? The Problem has been going on for fifty years, so they can't do much worse.
Lucy and her colleagues, George Karim and Anthony Lockwood, are so fun to watch as they develop trust and skills to meet the demands of this world.
I love the technology in Lockwood & Co. Instead of developing communication technology (personal computers, cell phones), this world developed technology that destroys dangerous ghosts. That seems to me exactly what would have happened. It also gives the experience of watching this show a somewhat nostalgic vibe. People communicate in the ways that they did when I was young.
Many of the exterior scenes were shot on location in London. This article at Country & Town House lists them. They traced Lockwood's house to a particular address on Claremont Square in Islington. A show about ghosts clearly needs a cemetery. Kensal Green Cemetery provided several locations. If you go, you can pay homage to author Wilkin Collins, one of many famous people buried there.
I was especially curious about a site that in the world of the story is called the British Archives. The filming location was the library at the School of Oriental and African Studies, known as SOAS, a member institution of the University of London. After looking around their website, I'd love to go there - the library is only part of the reason.
Thanks to Erin at Cracker Crumb Life for recommending Lockwood and Co in a Sunday Salon post a few weeks ago.
Lockwood & Co left us with an ending that begs for a series two, but there's no word yet on whether it will get one. Lockwood & Co is based on a series of books by Jonathan Stroud, so there's definitely more material available. If you have Netflix, please watch this show to encourage them to make a second season for us.
About Joy Weese Moll
a librarian writing about books
