Where is Call the Midwife filmed?

How Call the Midwife uses Kent, Surrey and the islands

Call the Midwife follows the Nonnatus House midwives and nuns caring for families in Poplar from the late 1950s onwards. The first series drew on Jennifer Worth's memoirs of the East End; later series, written by creator Heidi Thomas, carried the story on well beyond them. Very little of it is filmed in London. The post-war East End no longer exists in usable form, so the production rebuilt it in Kent, inside the walls of the Historic Dockyard Chatham, and has filmed there through all fifteen series, according to the Kent Film Office.

At Chatham, real Georgian and Victorian naval buildings play a whole district. The Fitted Rigging House has been both the Lisbon Buildings tenement and a homeless shelter. The Admiral's Offices stand in for the Poplar Maternity Home and the London Hospital. Anchor Wharf and the dockyard railway become Poplar's docks, and the Victorian Ropery plays a working ropery. The Royal Dockyard Church appeared as a graveyard in series 11 and as the Board of Health in series 15. Because these are all inside one ticketed museum, this guide treats them as one location page rather than a string of separate visits.

Nonnatus House itself has moved. In the first two series the exterior and interiors were filmed at the former St Joseph's College in Mill Hill, north London, a seminary since converted into private homes. Since then the house has been a built set at Longcross Studios in Surrey, a working studio that does not offer tours. Surrey also gave the production Royal Holloway's Founder's Building and the Horsley Towers estate, both listed by Visit Surrey, and Chiltern Open Air Museum in Buckinghamshire filmed at its 1940s prefab.

The Christmas specials travel further. The 2018 special used the beach at West Wittering in West Sussex around the nuns' Mother House visit. The 2019 special took the team to the Outer Hebrides, and Visit Outer Hebrides names five places: the Calanais Standing Stones, Gearrannan Blackhouse Village, St Clement's Church at Rodel, Eilean Glas Lighthouse on Scalpay and Luskentyre beach. The two-part 2024 special put its Poplar funfair at Dreamland in Margate. The 2016 special filmed near Cape Town and the 2025 special in Hong Kong, but no exact public sites are named for either.

The best way to visit is to book the dockyard's official Call the Midwife location tour, created with producer Neal Street Productions. It lasts about 90 minutes, includes same-day museum entry and ends with a gallery of original costumes, props and preserved sets. Filming dressing is taken down after each shoot, so the streets look like a naval dockyard when the crew is away, and the guide shows you which corner played which scene. Allow the rest of the day for the ships and galleries.

Two places in this guide are private and should only be seen from public ground: the converted Mill Hill seminary and the working studio at Longcross. The new three-part prequel, Call the Midwife: Sisters in Arms, is set in 1939 and was filmed at Longcross for Christmas 2026. It had not been broadcast when this guide was updated, and no public locations have been named for it.