There is a scene early in the second Enola Holmes film where the titular detective, played with crisp determination by Millie Bobby Brown, cycles through a London street that looks exactly as Victorian England should: cobbles, fog, horse-drawn carriages. But the audience knows this is not the London of Dickens. It is the London of Netflix.
And the girl on the bicycle is not just a character. She is a signal. Brown, alongside her co-star Louis Partridge, sat down last week to discuss what they call a ‘British film’s international triumph’.
But what does that phrase mean on the ground? For the film industry, it means a significant shift. Once upon a time, a British period drama was a creature of the BBC: polite, restrained, watched by a domestic audience.
Enola Holmes, by contrast, is a global juggernaut. It was watched by 76 million households in its first month. Its star, Brown, is a 21-year-old from Bournemouth who learned her craft on a Stranger Things set in Atlanta.
Partridge, a Londoner, remembers filming on location in Hull and thinking, ‘This is for the world.’ The cultural shift is subtle but real. In the cafe where we met, two American tourists recognised Brown without the Sherlock Holmes trappings.
They did not ask for a picture with ‘Enola’. They asked for a picture with ‘Millie from Stranger Things’. The lines are blurring.
The human cost of this triumph is also worth noting. British crews, often working on lower budgets than their US counterparts, are now expected to produce the same scale. One crew member told me, off the record, that the pressure is immense.
‘We used to have three months to shoot a six-part series. Now we have four months to shoot a feature film that looks like it cost ten times what it did.’ But Partridge is philosophical.
‘The industry has changed. It has to. We are competing with everything, everywhere.
’ Brown nods. She has been in the spotlight since she was twelve. She knows the price.
But she also knows the payoff. ‘British films used to be a niche. Now they are mainstream.
That means more stories, more jobs, more people seeing our culture.’ And that, perhaps, is the real triumph. Not just a film.
But a quiet revolution in how we tell stories. From a girl on a bicycle to a global audience, the journey is shorter than it used to be. And the streets of London, for now, are leading the way.
