The Thursday Murder Club: Here’s How Netflix Brought Coopers Chase To Life

The day is finally here: The Thursday Murder Club is officially screening in select UK cinemas from today, bringing Richard Osman’s beloved cosy crime novel to life. Directed by Chris Columbus and starring Hollywood greats Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie, the film centres on four friends living in a peaceful retirement village in rural England, who meet up every Thursday to puzzle over unsolved murders. But when a brutal murder takes place right on their doorstep, Elizabeth, Rob, Ibrahim and Joyce find themselves smack dab in the middle of their very first live case.

The doorstep in question is Coopers Chase, a picturesque retirement village invented by Osman but inspired by his mother’s own retirement community in Sussex. In the book, Coopers Chase is situated in Kent near the fictional town of Fairhaven. But where was The Thursday Murder Club filmed? We sat down with production designer James Merrifield to learn all about how the team lifted Osman’s story from the page and brought it to the big screen.

Celia Imrie, Helen Mirren, Naomi Ackie, Pierce Brosnan & Sir Ben Kingsley in The Thursday Murder Club. (© Giles Keyte/Netflix)

Where Was The Thursday Murder Club Filmed?

The Thursday Murder Club was mainly filmed at Englefield House, which stands in for the iconic Coopers Chase. A Grade II* listed Elizabethan country house in Berkshire, Englefield dates back to 1558 and takes its name from its former residents the Englefield family, before Queen Elizabeth I confiscated the house from Sir Francis Englefield – a devotee of the Catholic Queen Mary – for consorting with the enemies.

After passing through various hands, Englefield eventually landed in the hands of the Benyon family where it remains today as a private abode (though the gardens are open to visitors every Monday throughout the year, including bank holidays). But Englefield is no stranger to public attention: in 2017 it hosted the wedding of Pippa Middleton and James Matthews, attended by Prince William and Princess Kate, then the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. You might also recognise it from films like The King’s Speech (2010) and Great Expectations (2012), television series Miss Austen, as well as Netflix series The Crown, the ‘Playtest’ episode of Black Mirror and most recently Lena Dunham’s Too Much.

And Netflix is back at Englefield once more for The Thursday Murder Club, which production designer James Merrifield describes as the ‘perfect’ Coopers Chase. ‘When I first read the script, I immediately thought of Englefield,’ he tells C&TH. ‘The scale of the house is perfect, the architectural style, the geography, the placing of the graveyard and the church… I showed Chris [Columbus] various other ideas, but we kept coming back to Englefield.’

Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Sir Ben Kingsley & Celia Imrie in The Thursday Murder Club. (© Giles Keyte/Netflix)

Creating Coopers Chase At Englefield

‘Something Richard Osman doesn’t do is write stage directions,’ James says. ‘His work is very much character-led and he doesn’t give you the backbone of the environment they are in, so working on The Thursday Murder Club was a joy because we had a blank canvas. We just had to find those characters and put them in the right environments – build the right homes for them to reside in.’

Elizabeth, Rob, Ibrahim and Joyce may all live at Coopers Chase, but you would be remiss to assume their living spaces are cookie-cutter rooms. ‘As a production designer I always start with the script, but I’m really looking at character references and thinking about how I can enable them to really inhabit a space.’

Concept art for Elizabeth’s apartment. (© Netflix)

James thinks of Elizabeth as ‘the grand old dame’ and her room as ‘the gold package’ with its ‘higher ceilings and grander architecture’ (inspired by Englefield House and designed to seamlessly fit in as the cameras move from the real exterior and corridors, but nonetheless built on a set). ‘She’s the forerunner of the Thursday Murder Club, the big chief, so she should definitely have the most glamorous, elegant, even regal room. There’s even a reference to her dressing up to look like the queen, so I felt the need for her room to be very sophisticated.’ Expect ornate plasterwork, coving and elegant colours on the walls.

‘It had to feel aspirational,’ James adds. ‘It should never feel like a retirement home. Audiences should see it and think “Oh my god, I want to retire, and I want to move there”.’

Concept art for Ibrahim’s apartment. (© Netflix)

Then there are Joyce and Ibrahim’s apartments – or the ‘silver package’ as James puts it with the ‘slightly lower ceilings, slightly smaller spaces’. Nevertheless, again, we have two very different rooms: ‘Ibrahim’s is the sort of gentleman’s club: dark panelled wood, beautiful parquet floor, lots of books, lots of leather, studded green leather furniture,’ James says.

Concept art for Joyce’s apartment. (© Netflix)

‘Joyce in contrast is the obsessive baker – the real Mary Berry of Coopers Chase,’ James says. ‘Her set was very Laura Ashley, lots of flowers, lots of yellow and pink. We referred to the set as the lemon drizzle cake.

‘Then you go up to the very top floor, and there you find Ron in the attic – the coal mining guy from the north,’ James says. ‘He’s the bronze package, so to speak, with lower ceiling space – but with the beer pump, the dartboard, the big flat screen TV… Very much a lad’s den.’

Concept art for Ron’s apartment. (© Netflix)

Elsewhere at Coopers Chase, the jigsaw room is a crucial space – ‘like another character in the story,’ James says. Watching The Thursday Murder Club, you will see a magnificent, light-filled orangery unfold, ready to host our quartet’s weekly murder club meetings. But in Osman’s book, the jigsaw room ‘is not really described as anything other than a room,’ James says. ‘But to just put them in a room would be deeply uncinematic. We wanted something memorable.

‘We decided to build a glass orangery onto the side of Englefield House,’ James says. ‘This means, when they are solving crimes, at all times you can also see the outside world: other Coopers Chase residents playing croquet, running around on a mobility scooter or, you know, feeding the llamas. It felt right to build something that was integral to the house, but also more cinematic.’

The orangery constructed at Englefield House to create the jigsaw room. (© Netflix)

The final challenge? The graveyard. While the Englefield Estate is actually home to its own graveyard and church, ‘obviously we were never going to be allowed to exhume a body – or even dig,’ James laughs. Instead the team built a new graveyard opposite the existing church: ‘we built a wall and a gate, and we had all the graves carved out of polystyrene to create our very own graveyard,’ James says. ‘That was a very big number.’

Where Is Fairhaven?

In The Thursday Murder Club, Coopers Chase is located in the Kent countryside near the village of Fairhaven. While Fairhaven is fictional, the village we see on screen is a real place – albeit on the other side of London: Albury in Hertfordshire.

‘Albury has that quintessential English duck pond and black and white Tudor cottages with picket fencing plus a rather good Village Hall which we converted into the police station,’ Merrifield says. ‘Back in the day, when I was a kid, the police station was very much the local bobby who resided in a converted shop, or in the case of town, a village hall.’

Concept art for the ‘chaotic’ police station. (© Netflix)

Again, the exterior we see on screen is the real thing, but the interiors were built on a set. ‘I wanted it to feel deeply chaotic,’ James says. ‘Here’s a police station where the most crime they’ve ever had to solve is finding someone’s lost cat. And suddenly there’s this enormous murder.’

Our head bobby is DCI Chris Hudson played by Daniel Mays, and ‘he resides in that space perfectly,’ James says. ‘He eats too much chocolate. He’s got a fat belly. He sort of snakes his way around the place, because it’s as lazy as the environment that he lives in. The PCs desks are stacked with in-trays so high that have never been looked at, and there’s an empty crime board on the wall. But suddenly there’s a crime, and they’ve used an old blackboard to do their crime-solving, with all the photographs and so on. This is opposed to the murder club, where it is all mapped out on very efficiently on the jigsaw board that flips around – beautifully presented and very neat to create the contrast of characters.’

Naomi Ackie and Daniel Mays in The Thursday Murder Club. (© Giles Keyte/Netflix)

Overall, James describes working on The Thursday Murder Club as ‘an absolute joy because it was deeply collaborative’.

‘It felt like one big happy family, which I hope comes across in the film,’ he adds.

The Thursday Murder Club is in select UK cinemas now, and will land on Netflix on Thursday 28 August 2025.

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