Bollywood stars come to Barnet

6:19pm Wednesday 10th January 2007

The sprawling Wrotham Park estate, on the road from Barnet to Potters Bar, has been the setting for a number of films, including Bridget Jones's Diary and Gosford Park, but the 150-acre plot is about to go one step further, by breaking into Bollywood.

Namastey London, which means Hello London in Hindi, is a cross-culture love story dealing with the ways young people look at love in the Western world compared to their peers in India. The lead character is Arjun, played by Akshay Kumar, who moves from India to London to win over a British girl he has fallen in love with - doing a bit of singing and dancing in the process.

The film also stars Rishi Kapoor, who has appeared in more than 100 Bollywood films, spanning four decades.

Producer Vipul Shah's second film, Waqt, received critical acclaim, and the publicity material for Namastey London declares that it will undisputedly propel him to become one of the most applauded directors of 2007'.

Between the Lines duly contacted Mr Shah at his office in Mumbai, from where he enthused: "We did a two-day shoot at Wrotham Park in July last year. We had a lot of junior artists coming in from the local area, they were painting backgrounds for us. Barnet is the only place with a junior artists' association, so I was told."

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He continued: "I was surprised there was such a place as Wrotham Park. It is a great property; huge and very beautiful. Every room has so many pieces worth over £1 million, it's amazing. It was scary to shoot in there, because if we had broken something, we'd have been in big trouble.

"Barnet is very quaint, a lovely little place, typical English countryside."

But filming potential smash-hit movies does not come cheap. Mr Shah said: "The film is very expensive. I would imagine the total will be about £3m, maybe more."

The stately home appears as the base for the character Charlie Brown, played by Clive Standon, who is the love interest of the character played by Bollywood babe Katrina Kaif.

Namastey London will be launched in Britain in early March.