Where was Band of Brothers filmed in the UK?

Fun fact that will ruin your next rewatch in the best way: Easy Company's entire war across Europe — Normandy, Holland, Bastogne, Germany — was fought almost entirely in Hertfordshire. Commuter-belt Hertfordshire. The one with the train delays.

Hatfield Aerodrome: one field, twelve countries' worth of rubble

The overwhelming majority of the 2001 HBO miniseries was shot at Hatfield Aerodrome, a former De Havilland/British Aerospace airfield about 30 miles from London that closed as a working airfield in 1994. Spielberg and Hanks already knew the place — they'd used it for Saving Private Ryan — and for Band of Brothers they went absolutely feral with it:

• A 12-acre backlot town was redressed and reshot to play a dozen different European locations, including Carentan, Eindhoven, Bastogne and Haguenau — same buildings, different rubble;
• The disused hangars became warehouses of war: one full of period tanks and jeeps, one of wardrobe, one of mannequin corpses, which is the most metal inventory list in television history;
• For the "Bastogne" episode, the crew built a fake Ardennes forest, using a reported 150,000 kilograms of paper to bury it in snow;
• Per SlashFilm, the set cost around $120 million, and Tony Blair personally leaned on negotiations to keep the shoot in the UK. The Prime Minister. For a TV show. Different era.

The site did fight back. Cinematographer Remi Adefarasin told American Cinematographer the flat, pond-ringed location had one flaw: "it got terribly misty, and any sort of backlight lit up the mist."

Twelve European towns, one manufactured forest, several thousand uniforms — and the production's real enemy was English weather. Poetic.

The rest of the UK map

Not everything fit on one airfield, even that one:

• North Weald Airfield, Essex — the D-Day takeoff scenes from episode one. Fittingly, North Weald was a real operational airfield in the actual war, though the planes lifting off are CGI;
• Hambleden, Buckinghamshire — the impossibly quaint village that played Aldbourne, where Easy Company billeted before D-Day. The Stag and Huntsman pub from the show is still pouring pints;
• Ashdown Forest, East Sussex — home of Winnie the Pooh, and also the backdrop for the Brécourt Manor guns assault in episode two, a sentence I need everyone to sit with.

Can you visit?

Sort of. The aerodrome itself is gone — the land is now the University of Hertfordshire's de Havilland Campus, so students currently cram for exams roughly where Carentan got shelled. Hambleden, though, looks essentially untouched, and the real Aldbourne in Wiltshire still keeps plaques and tributes to Easy Company. Go for the history; stay because the pub is right there.