In 2004 we were contacted by a producer looking for a site with ancillary buildings that could be used like a studio, a large, empty historic house with a variety of different sized rooms and spacious grounds.
With its Grade I Listed Mansion House, West Wing and 63 acres of ornate gardens and parkland, Balls Park was ideal and was selected as the prime location for the BBC’s adaptation of the 19th century thriller Bleak House by Charles Dickens. The crew spent six months filming at Balls Park and three months later in October 2005 the first episode was screened on BBC1.
Producer Nigel Stafford Clark explains why Balls Park was an ideal location:
"We took a decision that we would try and find one large, empty historic house with a variety of different sized rooms, and we'd use that house to be the interiors of a lot of different places. That would save us having to move location every few days and meant we could stay mainly in one place, which could become like a studio and therefore we could shoot more quickly. Our location manager found the perfect place - Balls Park, just outside Hertford, which is a Grade I listed building and it fitted the bill and had everything we needed.”
“[Balls Park] even had a room we were able to use as Chancery, which is at the heart of Bleak House and around which all the various stories revolve. The Balls Park Mansion has a wood-panelled room which goes up three floors and up to the roof - no one could tell us what it had been used for - but it was just what we needed."