‘It suddenly became the cool thing to do’: inside Bristol’s thriving ‘Skins’ tourist industry

I’m standing on a very normal road in Bristol, opposite a very normal-looking house. There’s nothing particularly notable about this property, with its contrasting dark brick, light stone and blue front door. So why does it feel so significant? Perhaps because, to a lot of people, this is an iconic TV location. Nearly two decades ago, this house featured on the hedonistic E4 teen drama Skins, as the home inhabited by the effortlessly cool Tony Stonem (Nicholas Hoult) and his perpetually smoking sister Effy (Kaya Scodelario). Now, 17 years since the show first aired, the home has become a point of pilgrimage for nostalgia-obsessed teenagers on unofficial Skins locations tours of Bristol.

In clips filmed here and posted mostly on TikTok, teens pull their moodiest faces as they pose on the curb in front of this regular terraced house. In others, the video makers stand in the front garden; in one particular clip, a young girl does her best Effy smoulder as she stands by the front door, cigarette in hand. 

Their obsession with the show is something I recognise from when I first watched it while growing up as a hormonal teenager in the late 00s. Airing in 2007, Skins was the racy drama set in a Bristol sixth-form college that propelled Jack O’Connell, Daniel Kaluuya and Dev Patel to stardom, each of them going on to have huge international careers. Watching it, you could all too easily convince yourself that everyone else your age was spending their time shagging in college class rooms, narrowly dodging run-ins with West Country gangsters, and doing an obscene amount of drugs (you, meanwhile, were stuck inside with your maths homework).

Back then, despite the characters’ experiences feeling a million miles away from my own, there was something strangely relatable about the whole thing; an idea that I could recreate the show’s magic simply by hopping on the rickety train to Bristol myself.

An enduring appeal 

Fast forward 17 years and Skins holds just as much appeal to today’s young people. The show was added to Netflix in 2017 and Hulu in 2020, giving a new generation access to the grungy aesthetics and dramatic lives of Tony, Effy and their cohorts. Now, these adolescents are flooding to the TV locations to ‘live their Skins life’.

Today’s teens love the programme for the same reasons my generation did when it first aired: from the exhilarating plots packed with parties and overdoses to the bordering on glamourised depictions of mental health issues. But Skins also offers nostalgia-obsessed Gen Zs the added appeal of the noughties aesthetic. 2019’s Sex Education or Euphoria might explore similarly edgy themes, but indie sleaze poster girl Effy did it in ripped fishnets and smudged eyeliner. And yes, Skins’ on-screen teens were struggling with drug addiction and murder plots, but the fact that they weren’t constantly on their phones? For a generation who love to romanticise the pre-social media age, it’s pure catnip.

From 2007 to 2013, Skins was filmed on location across Bristol (three of the show’s most popular characters returned in 2015 for standalone series Skins: Redux, which saw them relocated to London and Manchester). At the time of the original six seasons, the Bristol Film Office, including manager Natalie Moore, helped the production team track down filming locations. Now, the city is still benefiting from the show’s popularity. In 2016, the council-affiliated team put together a dedicated online map marking out 59 Skins spots across Bristol. There’s no official walking tour, but visitors to the city can use the map to track down the show’s most recognisable spots, from parks to bus stops, and capture them on film or even recreate the shots.

I wanted to visit where my comfort show was filmed

Locations on the map are separated by the show’s seven seasons – a longevity few programmes are offered in the streaming age. It’s this that keeps drawing people to the programme and Bristol, Moore theorises. 19-year-old Isabel started watching the show in 2021, and says it was the ‘unfiltered’ representation of teenage life that drew her in. Despite all the drugs and death, Skins became her ‘comfort show’, and she wanted to visit Bristol ‘to feel as close to the characters as she could’.

I grew up in a nearby Gloucestershire town when the show’s second generation was on air, so Bristol felt within my reach even when the characters’ heady, fast-paced lives weren’t. The teens of today feel the same. They also visit Bristol to see the show’s most instantly recognisable locations – luscious College Green, bustling Park Street, beauty spot Brandon Hill – and they film everything, packaging the footage up into ‘Best Skins locations’ TikTok compilations, captioned with hashtags like #skinsuk, #effystonem and #tumblr, all underscored with dialogue from the show. ‘Wandering through Bristol feeling like a Skins character,’ one video reads. ‘Serving Skins on our walk of shame from the afters at 8am,’ says another. One clip, which shows the creators directly recreating shots from the show, has upwards of a million views.

In search of Skins

So, on what feels like the last sunny Saturday of the year, I set out in search of Bristol’s new generation of Skins fans. The city’s universities have been back for a few weeks and students are everywhere. Bristol is a decidedly young-feeling city; that’s one of the things that Skins creators, the father-son duo Bryan and Jamie Elseley, aided by a writers’ room with an average age of 22, captured so well.

Naturally, there’s something a little bewildering about the fact that most of the people who make these Skins homages on TikTok would have barely been in primary school when the programme first came out. Dewi, 20, hails from the Netherlands and fell in love with the ‘very, very English’ world of Skins in 2020. She, too, calls the programme her ‘comfort show’. When Dewi came to the UK on a study abroad programme in 2023, she knew she had to visit Bristol, where she filmed her own Skins location video. ‘Walking around the city felt quite full circle to me,’ she says.

Visiting the filming locations suddenly became the cool thing to do.

Lots of the video creators aren’t from the UK and have added a Bristol stop to their trips purely to see the show’s locations. These unofficial tours get them seeing a side of the city they might normally miss, like the housing estates or residential areas used to represent both the programme’s posh kids and working-class teens.

Adele Straughan also works at the Bristol Film Office and helped put the Skins location map together. She’s seen the show’s enduring appeal to the younger generation first hand; her daughter was born in 2004 and remembers when, a couple of years ago, visiting the Skins filming locations ‘suddenly became the cool thing to do’. ‘Her friends who didn’t live in Bristol, who’d watched Skins, wanted to come to Bristol and go to those key locations,’ she recalls.

I’m intrigued to see if I can find some of these video makers. A friend in tow, I make my first stop at Brandon Hill Park, one of the show’s most iconic locations and a great viewpoint to look out over Bristol. ‘Cassie’s bench’ from season one, as it’s known locally, is where Hannah Murray’s waifish character Cassie overdosed, as well as being the backdrop for some of the early season’s fleeting moments of tenderness.

For many fans, this is a highlight of any Skins tour. ‘Cassie’s bench was definitely my favourite place,’ Isabel says. ‘The view was beautiful – and Cassie is such a great character.’ I struggle to find any hardcore fans here, but I know I’m more likely to find Skins devotees at the original house that was used as the house of lead characters Tony and Effy, even if I do feel uneasy about how a private home has become a tourist attraction. The house is still occupied and doesn’t feature on the Bristol Film Office’s map, but it can be found with a quick google.

Here, I run into two exceedingly polite university students dressed in crop tops and cargo trousers, looking at the house from the other side of the street. Having recently moved to Bristol to study, they tell me Skins was a bonding point between them in freshers’ week, and they wanted to tick off the most famous locations before the weather got bad. The first years keep a respectful distance as they take photos of the house. Their behaviour seems far more reflective of your average Skins fan visiting the home than the more extreme TikTokers who, literally, overstep boundaries. They come to admire, maybe take pictures, but aren’t willing to pose on anyone’s doorstep.

It’s easy to be cynical about, or roll your eyes at, a younger generation feeling nostalgic about Skins and the far-flung era of 2007. But the only difference between the teens of today filming their TikToks and me and my friends running across Cabot Circus bridge in the early 2010s, hand in hand like the characters did? We didn’t film it. Had our phones had cameras, I’m sure we would have. 

And just as the show was praised at the time for casting untrained, not-famous actors from open casting calls, Skins showed a side to Bristol beyond the usual tourist locations. It portrayed the city almost like it really is. If that keeps bringing young people there nearly 20 years on, is that such a bad thing?

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