Taking my usual route into the centre of Liverpool a few months ago, I did a double take: the car park I pass each day was suddenly teeming with Sixties-style vehicles, resplendent with sleek tailfins and leather seats. Much as the evidence suggested otherwise, I hadn’t fallen into a time warp – this fleet of classic cars was simply a sign that another period drama was setting up shop in the city.

Living here means getting used to these double-take moments. Your commute might bring you past a Cold War intelligence base for a John le Carré adaptation, or an elaborately built prison camp, like the one that popped up in Sefton Park for Channel 4 thriller Army of Shadows.

My home city is now the most filmed area in the UK outside of London, hosting more than 1,600 film and TV productions since 2019; these have brought in around £150m to the local economy. Not for nothing has it acquired the nickname of “the Hollywood of the North”. On average, there are “about three or four productions filming simultaneously”, says Lynn Saunders, head of the Liverpool Film Office. In the past year alone, the pace, turnover and sheer scope of productions have felt particularly relentless from my Mersey vantage point.

We’ve seen the city go back to the Sixties for not one but two Beatles-related projects – or technically five, if you’re counting the four Sam Mendes movies separately. There’s one for each Beatle, and they all filmed here under the codename “Clover”. In the spring, my WhatsApp groups seemed to be filled with sightings of Paul Mescal – here to recreate scenes in Paul McCartney’s childhood haunts – in various delis.

One friend was convinced she’d “overheard Barry Keoghan” (aka Ringo) while walking the dog one evening; it was too dark for her to verify, though. “They were strolling around Sefton Park and happy to chat,” Saunders says. “It’s a really relaxed vibe in the city, and the cast and crew really enjoy that.”

The BBC also has a Fab Four endeavour in the works. Hamburg Days focuses on the band’s formative stint in Germany, but features their hometown too. In the summer, sticky-floored pub The Blue Angel (affectionately known to generations of students as The Raz) doubled up as a Sixties version of The Jacaranda, the venue where The Beatles first performed under that band name.

It’s not just period pieces. Contemporary stories like local hero Jimmy McGovern’s Time and police thriller The Responder won acclaim, while crime drama This City Is Ours has been a massive success story; the first season, which aired in March 2025, averaged around 6.3 million viewers. These shows were supported by the city region’s £2.8m Production Fund, which invests in screen projects to help grow the film and TV sector here.

This City Is Ours, aka “the Scouse Sopranos”, stars James Nelson-Joyce as a gangster embroiled in an ever-shifting power struggle, and the second season, airing now, has received reviews even stronger than the first. It’ll come to a tense conclusion on Monday, but a third series is already in the works. Last spring, I interviewed Nelson-Joyce – who was born in Orrell Park, north Liverpool, and counts Bafta-winning Scouser Stephen Graham as a mentor – in a city centre coffee shop. Back then, he ordered his vanilla latte undisturbed by fellow customers. But his profile has shot up so rapidly that, should we try the same set-up now, I’m sure there’d be plenty of attention from locals.

The 37-year-old, who started his career with roles in Scouse productions like Little Boy Blue and Time, encapsulates how the influx of Liverpool-based shows provides opportunities for local talent. When he went to drama school in London, Nelson-Joyce told me, he was told to lose his accent, because he wouldn’t work much as a Scouser. Now, as Saunders puts it, he has “leading man status; he’s the face of Marks & Spencers and [there’s] Bond rumours”.

When Saunders was growing up in the Eighties, Channel 4 soap Brookside filmed on the edge of her estate in Huyton, “and that always inspired me”, she said. She joined the council’s arts unit from a government training scheme not long after, at a time when “the interest to film in Liverpool was already there from both filmmakers and TV companies”, for shows such as Bread and Boys from the Blackstuff, and films like Letter to Brezhnev. “The phone was busy,” she says, but “the council wasn’t really too sure how to answer the phone to the industry”.

They set up the film office, the first of its kind in Europe, in 1989, and “looked to its neighbours over the water in New York” for inspiration, working out how they could support productions in Liverpool and hopefully benefit residents too. “The New York Film Office advises not to censor projects,” Saunders says, and the LFO followed its example, not getting too hung up on how particular storylines might portray the city. “Take away some potentially controversial storylines and what you remember is actually how beautiful the city looks,” Saunders says.

So while there has been a smattering of criticism of This City Is Ours – with its emphasis on drug dealers masterminding mega-shipments of “lemo”, or cocaine – it’s also hard to deny that the region looks pretty incredible at the same time, from the iconic waterfront to beloved pubs in the Georgian Quarter to posh golf clubs over on the Wirral peninsula.

The Film Office prides itself on making it easy to film here, Saunders says, and “about 70 per cent of our business is repeat business”. It helps, she says, that many of Liverpool’s most striking buildings – from the town hall, where the Beatles movies recently filmed, to Croxteth Hall, which featured in Netflix’s House of Guinness – are under council ownership, which removes some red tape.

The council is based in the Grade II-listed Cunard Building, and “the facade is always filmed as London, as Whitehall, as New York”. A few moments away is the Liver Building, which doubled as Gotham City Police Department in 2022’s The Batman; in one scene, Robert Pattinson’s caped crusader leaps from the clock tower for a quick getaway. “It was like: ‘Cool, bring it on, let’s do this,’” Saunders says. “That goes a long way with filmmakers. We’re a city that says ‘yes’.”

Samantha Beddoe is the co-founder of It’s All Made Up Productions, which she launched with Adolescence director – and fellow Liverpudlian – Philip Barantini. They’re based in London but plan to open a Liverpool office soon. For her, a big part of Liverpool’s screen appeal is the architecture. “It’s not a massive city, so it’s easy to navigate around, and the architecture on offer is so different,” she says. “You can be wherever you need to be within 15, 20 minutes: modern, Georgian, Victorian.”

Before setting up her company, she spent much of her career in the accounts department for shows and films “shot all around London”, and knows “how painful and expensive it is to move around” the capital. Liverpool, meanwhile, is “this little gem of a city that has so much to offer without having to travel for hours, which is key”.

In the past, when “big shows chose to film in Liverpool”, Saunders adds, “they would come fully crewed” with staffers from outside the city, but “on average, now, 60 per cent of the workplace is crewed locally”. The Film Office has various training and development programmes, and helps put “hundreds and hundreds of people in paid placement opportunities”, she notes; previously, they “would have been bussed in from outside our region”.

Beddoe and Barantini both ended up leaving “to pursue [their] dream, because back when we were looking for work, there wasn’t any in Liverpool”. Now, Bedoe says, they “want to be able to pay it forward, because these opportunities weren’t around then. We understand how valuable they are”. Last year, they set up acting workshops in the city, and now offer classes for 12- to 17-year-olds as well as sessions for adults, with more than 100 students taking part.

Their industry connections allow them to host monthly Q&As “and get all of our friends in – actors, casting directors, agents, producers – to come and talk to [students], to show them normal people who work in the industry, who’ve just persevered”. In the summer, Adolescence’s breakout star Owen Cooper was in the hot seat; in December, Barantini will speak to Jodie Comer in a special event at the Epstein Theatre.

A big part of future-proofing the industry here hinges on putting some major production infrastructure in place. “It needs one big hub – one big, solid infrastructure that isn’t going anywhere,” Beddoe says. The Depot, a 20,000 sq ft production space, opened off Edge Lane in 2021, and there have long been plans for another major project just down the road.

Since 2017, the Littlewoods Building, an Art Deco marvel fallen into dereliction, has been earmarked for a TV and film production complex, but the site was damaged by a major fire in 2018. Since then, there has been plenty of back and forth – including struggles to secure funding – but an announcement in John Healey’s budget in October, allocating £20m for redevelopment, has galvanised the project, known as Liverpool Creative Campus. “We’d be first in the queue for office space there,” Beddoe says.

All being well, the 260,000 square foot development will bring together studio space and post-production operations; it will also be the home of ScreenWorks Liverpool, a post-16 education facility providing industry training for 800 students. “When fully operational, the current plans are expected to support around 630 permanent jobs and generate an estimated £56m a year for the economy,” says Liam Robinson, leader of Liverpool City Council.

He hopes, too, that a “cluster” of suppliers, tech companies, freelancers and start-ups will flock to the city, “because the talent and infrastructure are here”. Essentially, he says, “we don’t just want to attract productions that come into the city for a few weeks. We want Liverpool residents building long-term careers in these industries”.

It’s a sentiment echoed by Beddoe. “We don’t want this to be a moment. We want it to stay that way,” she says.