'Berlin' Turkish Cafe - Smiley's People Location

Some of the locations used in these series are fairly easy to find, some require a bit of detective work and others simply would never be found without an eye witness account. The subject of this article certainly falls into the latter of those categories. 

It is well known that filming of the climactic scenes in 'Smiley's People' took place beneath Nottingham's Lady Bay Bridge, doubling as Karla's crossing point in Berlin. 

The BBC laid down rubber cobbles to give the appearance of a road running under the arches of the bridge. The viewer had seen Smiley and Guillam having a coffee in a Turkish cafe across the other side of this 'road', but in reality there are no shops in the vicinity.

Having watched the series many times I'd always wondered if the scenes in the cafe might have been shot on a set but thanks to Chris's eagle eyes he spotted a comment on a YouTube video from John Howitt revealing the location of the cafe: 

The bridge used was Lady Bay Bridge in Nottingham which is a rail bridge that was converted to a road bridge. Some of the scenes were shot under the bridge as well. The Turkish Cafe was/is at the bottom of Musters Road in West Bridgford in Nottingham near the Trent Bridge cricket ground. It is still a restaurant but somewhat more upmarket than the set cafe. I was living in West Bridgford and working in Sneinton at the time which meant I had to go over the bridge every day and leave the US sector and enter the "East Berlin" Russian sector which was quite amusing. The set was there for about two weeks.

Here is the location of the cafe today. It’s now a family run Italian restaurant called La Storia, so if you want to dine where Smiley and Guillam waited for Karla you can book a table here.

The image below shows Toby Esterhase standing outside what is now the Autosave Motorist Centre. We can see the BBC have added the frontage of another shop on the right which is likely covering the drive.

Below we can see Smiley and Guillam leaving the cafe. 

The appearance of both shops has obviously changed enormously in the intervening forty years but as you can see from the two images below, the window ledge above the shop is still a match. 

As I've highlighted on the map below the locations were fairly close together, but without John Howitt's post I doubt we would ever have found where the cafe scenes were shot.

If you have any first hand information about filming locations for 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy' or 'Smiley's People' do get in touch as I'd be delighted to share them with everyone here. You can email me at guinnessissmiley@icloud.com