Building Fictional (but Believable) Addresses

The risk increases when an address is tied to something incriminating or controversial, but even for minor details, it’s important to ensure that no real-world location is unintentionally featured.

Striking the right balance between realism and fiction can be tricky. Some productions use real but low risk public locations like parks, empty lots, or rural areas to ensure the address isn’t linked to any people or business. However, you're much safer creating an address that is entirely fictional—at every level. That way, whether it appears on a pizza delivery menu or ends up as the home of a villain, you’re covered. You never know which production may go onto be a cult hit - resulting in hundreds of  fans on pilgrimages to a new residential estate that used to be parking lot back in the day.

1. House Number 

A fictional door number is one to always aim for if you can. Sometimes the team may want to see the real door number at a particular location - particularly if its difficult to cover up. Always check with your location team on this.

If there's no pressure to use a real door number but there are worries about the street being otherwise recognisable (due to the style of house or other landmarks) then the best approach is to research the highest door number on the street and add another 10 or 20 to make sure you have a wide birth - Google Maps is great for this and then it can be verified with the Royal Mail address finder or the USPS Zipcode lookup. There are lots of equivalent registers for most countries but for this guide I'll focus on the UK and the US.

3. City or Town

Often this is fixed and trying to work in a fictional town would break the illusion of authenticity. The story will usually be firmly set in Cardiff or London or New York but you may have some flexibility with the suburb /village name within that larger city. When the city is firmly part of the story we will always work to make sure the other parts of the address (door number, street name and postcodes) are fictional.

In case you're stuck, here's a few suburb/town names to use that are fictional in the US and England - including a couple that imply locations in Wales & Scotland.

You can locate these fictional towns more solidly to a particular UK region by adding a local river to the na§me i.e "Forwether on Severn" for Gloucestershire or "Forwether on Trent" for Midlands

Location Agreement

Sometimes the location release has given permission to use the real address. It’s important to check this one with your location manager and lawyer to make sure that it is actually covered in a fully executed release. It’s becoming more and more common for locations to ask for the specifics to be obscured - particularly as fans get more die hard.