Liverpool Street Station

What is better than setting out to find a film location? Surely, it's the surprise realisation that a familiar place has featured in a favourite film.

Such is the case with Liverpool Street Station. The Underground station is buried in the bowels of the mainline terminus used by Essex-bound trains, requiring one to walk through the concourse to access the tube. The concourse is impressive, with an airy vaulted ceiling, a distinctive arrival/departure board, and the little mezzanine mall of glass-roofed shops.

I pass through the station quite regularly, averaging once per week in my first three months in London. From the first visit it seemed familiar, although I could not think why. Successive visits fostered this niggling sense of familiarity, until a search on IMDb solved the mystery. Liverpool Street Station appears in Brian De Palma's Mission: Impossible. It's the location for a meeting between spy master Jim Phelps (Jon Voight) and disavowed agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), where the latter discovers that seeing is not necessarily believing.