Walford

Walford
EastEnders location
Bridge Street Café before its refurbishment in 2009
Created by	Tony Holland and Julia Smith
Genre	Soap opera
In-universe information
Type	London borough
Locations	The Queen Victoria
Characters	EastEnders characters

Walford is a fictional borough of east London in the BBC soap opera EastEnders. It is the primary setting for the soap. EastEnders is filmed at Borehamwood in Hertfordshire, towards the north-west of London. Much of the location work is filmed in nearby Watford, which was chosen for many of the exterior scenes due to its close proximity and the town's name being so similar to Walford. Thus, any stray road signs or advertising boards which are accidentally filmed in the back of shots will appear to read Walford. Locations used in Watford include most interior and exterior church scenes of various churches, the snooker club, the County Court and Magistrates' Courts courtrooms, and the cemetery (where most of the deceased characters are interred).

The name Walford is both a street in Dalston where one of the series' creators, Tony Holland, lived and a blend of Walthamstow, where Holland was born, and Stratford.^[1] The suffix '-ford' is found throughout Britain (for example, Bradford, Guildford and Telford); it just means the first place you can cross a river.^[2] Walford's London postcode district is E20 (real East London postcode districts only went up to E18^[3] until 2011, when E20 was introduced to serve the London 2012 Olympic Park).^[4] Walford's fictional tube station, Walford East, is located on the EastEnders tube map in the position normally occupied by the real Bromley-by-Bow tube station.^[5][6] As part of the 2010 Children In Need charity appeal, Walford became twinned with Weatherfield in a special programme uniting the two soaps EastEnders and Coronation Street called "East Street".