Film crews in Sussex town said to be shooting series 2 of The Gold for BBC

The crews were using a heist to film from the top of a seafront building.

There has been much speculation as to what they are filming, but the Hastings Observer has been told on good authority that they are filming for the second series of the TV drama - The Gold.

The Gold is a British television drama series written by Neil Forsyth and starring Hugh Bonneville, Dominic Cooper, Charlotte Spencer, Sean Harris, Jack Lowden and Tom Cullen.

It is a dramatisation of events around the Brink's-Mat robbery in 1983.

The first episode was aired on BBC One on 12 February 2023. The BBC commissioned a second series in November 2023.

It makes sense that they are filming in Hastings as the town has a link with the Brinks-Mat robbery. In 2001, police swooped on the area and began excavating land owned by a builders' merchant in Hastings.

It is understood Scotland Yard's flying squad ordered the dig when officers received credible information from underworld sources that gold bars had been buried on the site.

A team of officers, working inside a large white tent, used drills and thermal imaging equipment, but nothing was found.

The robbery, at 6.30am on November 26 1983, was Britain's biggest, securing £26m of gold. A bribed security guard let six armed men into the Brink's-Mat warehouse. They poured petrol over staff and threatened them with a lit match if they did not reveal the combination numbers of the vault.

It is thought more than £17m of the cash realised from the gold has been accounted for by police, and some of the remainder is thought to have been invested in property in Britain and Spain.

Dozens of gold bars are still unaccounted for. It was assumed most had been melted down and would never be recovered. Only two of the robbers have been convicted. Michael McAvoy and Brian Robinson are each serving 25 years.

Hastings has been used as a film location on numerous occasions, most recently in January for the horror film Punch and before that for The Great Escaper, starring Michael Caine, about a World War 2 veteran who absconds from a care home to attend the anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy.

Foyle’s War, which regularly saw more than seven million viewers tune into its two-hour episodes, was shot in Hastings. Another popular show filmed in Hastings and St Leonards was the BBC four-part thriller Roadkill starring Hugh Laurie.

In 2011, Neil Jordan’s British vampire film Byzantium was filmed in Hastings. It featured a centuries-old prostitute, played by Gemma Arterton. In 2007, Is Anybody There?, a British film starring Michael Caine as an elderly ex-magician in the early stages of dementia was also shot in the town. Other movies filmed in Hastings include the 1999 biopic Grey Owl, directed by Richard Attenborough, and starring Pierce Brosnan as the Hastings schoolboy turned Native American fur trapper and conservationist Archibald Stansfeld Belaney.

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