English Heritage manages over 400 historic sites across England — castles, abbeys, Roman forts, Tudor manors, and industrial landmarks that have appeared on screen for decades. Their dedicated film and TV team handles all production enquiries in-house, fielding briefs from location managers and scouts looking for everything from a Jacobean great hall to a windswept coastal fortification. 180 of those sites are now live on their SuperScout showcase, with more being added soon.
The demand is real and ongoing. What was missing was the right tool to meet it.
The challenge
English Heritage already had a website. But it was built for visitors, not productions. For a filmmaker trying to assess whether a site was right for their brief, it fell short in almost every way:
- One photo per location — not nearly enough to judge a site’s filming potential, its light, its scale, its details
- No filming context — no information about facilities, access, or what made each site distinctive for a production
- No map view — addresses existed, but there was no way to see where sites sat in relation to each other or to studios
- No search — with 400+ sites, there was no way for a location manager to search by era, style, geography, or any other production criteria
The result: the film team was the bottleneck. Every enquiry meant manually pulling together images, context, and site suggestions to respond — a slow, labour-intensive process for a team that needed to be fast.
And switching to an external platform wasn’t straightforward either. English Heritage handles all their own filming enquiries and bookings. They needed a tool that gave productions a powerful way to explore their sites — without any third party inserting itself into the relationship or taking over how enquiries were managed.
The solution
English Heritage launched a dedicated SuperScout showcase — a map-based, searchable database of their sites built purely for the film and TV industry.
Each location now has multiple photos, filming-relevant details, and its position shown on a map alongside every other English Heritage site. A location manager can search by brief, by area, by the type of site they need — and get results across the full portfolio in seconds. The relationship between sites and their distance from major studios is immediately visible.
Crucially, SuperScout is software, not an agency. Every enquiry still goes directly to the English Heritage film team. Nothing about how they work with productions changed — they just gained a tool that lets them work faster, and lets productions explore the full portfolio before picking up the phone.
In Christina’s words
“We chose SuperScout because it gives us exactly what we wanted: a clear, map-based way to showcase our sites and their relationship to studios, without handing over control of our filming enquiries.
SuperScout is unique in the market. There isn’t anything else that does what this platform does for locations, and it’s incredibly user friendly.
Our peers did a huge amount of due diligence and still concluded: there is no one else who can offer what SuperScout offers. For us it was a complete no-brainer to sign up.
Compared to other platforms we’ve used, SuperScout is so much easier to use. It’s intuitive, fast, and lets us actually find what we need.
You can just tell you love what you do. That’s another big part of why we wanted to work with you — we had a lot of faith in you from the moment we met.”
The result
The English Heritage film team now has a dedicated tool that matches the scale and quality of their portfolio. Productions can explore 180 sites — with more coming soon — by location, era, style, and brief — before they’ve even made contact. The map view makes it immediately clear how sites relate to each other and to major studios across England.
For the team, the efficiency gain is significant: responding to a production enquiry now means pointing them to a showcase that does much of the work, rather than manually assembling a response from scratch. And because SuperScout sits entirely outside their enquiry and booking process, the team retains full control of every conversation and relationship.
