In his review of the final Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011), The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw comments on the use of London's St Pancras railway station to represent nearby King's Cross, from where, in the stories, the Hogwarts train departs. Noting that ‘millions of tourists are undoubtedly convinced that this building is, in fact, King's Cross’, he concludes that ‘[St Pancras] may be forced simply to change its name’. Whether or not this actually happens, that such an outcome is even conceivable gives some insight into the ways film and cinematographic tourism practices can exert a powerful influence on not just how cities are imagined but also on the geographical reconfiguration of material urban landscapes. The more that the correspondence between on- and off-screen space is made explicit – that is, the more that location becomes a focus of attention, whether academically (in texts such as this) or as a site of discourse and practice more generally (film tourism guide books, movie maps and tours, virtual and interactive geographies of film in gallery and museum exhibits, online cine-maps, DVD compilations of archive footage of cities and other urban places, psychogeographies of film, site-specific film practices, screening of films in the locations where they were shot and so on) – the more the contradictory modalities of film and urban space are made manifest. To this end, Lefebvre's contention that, in terms of space, film is an ‘incriminated medium’, while provoking counter assertions as to the different ways that it isn't, also raises important and urgent critical questions regarding the cinematization of space and place, and the social, cultural and political implications this has for cities such as Liverpool.

In this book I have endeavoured to explore, or indeed map, these contradictory tensions; showing how cinematic geographies are complicit in the production and expansion of virtual spaces of the city (which, as we have seen, are closely tied to processes of regeneration, consumption and post-industrial urban renewal), but also how they both constitute and facilitate forms of urban mediation in which cities may be ‘known’ in more complex ways; that is, as the product of spatial epistemologies that do not merely reduce them to spectacle and simulacra.