Antonioni's London Blow-Up (1966)
Antonioni rebuilt London location by location
Antonioni and Carlo Di Palma did not film "London" in the touristic sense. They picked specific buildings and parks, repainted them, and constructed an Antonioni geography that exists nowhere outside the film. The director spent six months scouting before the shoot, walking with cinematographer and production designer to a precise list of locations.
The doss-house: a railway arch in Peckham
The opening sequence's doss-house — where Thomas peels off from a line of haggard men at dawn — was filmed beneath the railway arch over Consort Road, just east of Peckham Rye Station in southeast London. The location is real; doss-houses operated under London railway arches into the 1960s. (movie-locations)
Cheyne Walk and 39 Princes Place
Thomas's studio is the actual studio belonging to fashion photographer John Cowan at 39 Princes Place, Holland Park. Cowan was a contemporary of Bailey and Donovan, working primarily in fashion through the 1960s; Antonioni leased his studio for several months and shot all the studio sequences there. The big skylight and white seamless paper are Cowan's working setup. The dressing area, the developing room, and the window onto the courtyard are exactly as Cowan had them in 1966. (wikipedia, movie-locations)
"I rented Cowan's studio because it was a working photographer's studio. I did not need to dress the space. I needed it to be the kind of room a man like Thomas would actually work in. Cowan's was." — Michelangelo Antonioni, The New York Times (1966 interview, archive 2007)
The decision matters. The studio scenes are about thirty-five minutes of screen time and the audience needs to read the space as authentic — needs to read Thomas as a working photographer, not a film director's idea of one. Cowan's actual lights, paper backdrops, lens cases, and developer trays are in frame.
The antique shop and Maryon Park
The "junk shop" Thomas visits in the morning was a real shop on Woolwich Road in Charlton, southeast London, dressed by the production. Antonioni picked it because it sat directly across from the entrance to Maryon Park, a small Victorian-era park down the hill from Charlton Park. The structural choice — that Thomas wanders out of the antique shop straight into the inciting incident — required a real shop that genuinely was across the street from a real park with a wire-fenced grass field. (movie-locations)
Maryon Park's appearance in the film is famously stylized. Antonioni and Di Palma had the grass painted greener for the inciting incident's long-lens couple sequence, and had several houses repainted on Foscari Road, just outside the park, to set off the climactic mime tennis scene. The white tennis court structures the audience reads as natural to the park were dressed for the production. (wikipedia)
"The greenness of the grass in Blow-Up is one of the most famous facts in cinematography. Half of it is the painting. Half of it is the long-lens compression that makes a small park feel like a wide field." — American Cinematographer, Carlo Di Palma feature (2004)
The Ricky-Tick at Elstree
The Yardbirds club sequence was filmed at a replica of the actual Ricky-Tick built at Elstree Studios in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire. The actual Ricky-Tick was in Windsor and was too small to shoot in. Antonioni's set designers built a more cinematically usable version. See The Yardbirds Club Scene.
The pot party at Cheyne Walk
The pot-party sequence was filmed at the Cheyne Walk apartment of art and antique dealer Christopher Gibbs, who was at the center of the Chelsea aristocratic-counterculture set in the mid-1960s. Gibbs was a friend of Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, and the broader Notting Hill / Chelsea scene; the apartment is the actual interior, not a set. (idyllopus)
The choice of Gibbs's apartment ratifies the film's argument about Thomas's social world. The pot party is not an underclass anonymous space; it is the apartment of a well-connected art dealer with the actual décor and people of the actual Chelsea set. The witness report Thomas is trying to file is being refused at the heart of the city's cultural elite.
The geography is a structural argument
The locations are arranged by Antonioni so that Thomas's morning runs west-to-east across central and southeast London — the Holland Park studio in the morning, the Charlton antique shop and Maryon Park around midday, the Cheyne Walk restaurant and Bill and Patricia's flat in the afternoon, and the Ricky-Tick (Elstree-built but reading as central) and the Cheyne Walk pot party at night. The film is structured by the photographer's territorial range: he can drive between any two of these locations on the same day, and each is a different institution of his world.
"Antonioni's London is the photographer's London. The locations are not scenery — they are the social map of the man at the center." — Senses of Cinema, Blow-Up review (2017)