"Turn! Turn! Jonathan Turn!"

Evy, shouting to her brother to make the bus swerve so that Ardeth can shake off his soldier mummy in the bus chase scene in The Mummy Returns

Bedford Square

If you leave UCL and travel down Gower Street you will find Bedford Square where a lot more bus driving took place. It provides nice period-ish street lights already in situ and a very handy tree to block out the sight of Centrepoint which is a huge modern office block visible above the roofs of the houses in the square.  This location is very near the real British Museum and is worth a look if you ever go there.

I say there was a lot of bus driving but in fact the bus passes twice round the same corner.  First (O’Connell is being bumped up and down on the bus by the mummy at this point) with the camera (yellow arrow) on a crane to get a nice high shot, the tree (blue arrow) still blocked out the office block for this.  Next they do a shoot from ground level to show the bus bashing into a street lamp that  had been put up for the duration. If you go to the square you will find that there are real lights which look period-ish enough to fit in this film which are placed on both sided of the road. The corner the bus turns to go out of the square, as Ardeth is under attack from a mummy’s knifelike-nails and Evy calls to Jon to turn, sends the bus careering off nearly into Tottenham Court Road (red arrow). There is a sort of spur out of the path here that in reality doesn’t have a light on it  and had to have one put up by the film crew next to the ubiquitous post box. This is the one which gets bashed up.

Here is an aerial photo showing the route of travel (red arrow), the location of the camera for these shots (green cross) and the tree which blocked out Centre Point (blue arrow).

Bus Ride Page