About a Boy | BFI IMAX, Waterloo — waiting outside the glass drum

Will's dating method requires a public meeting point he can leave from quickly, and the film puts him outside the glass drum at the south end of Waterloo Bridge, hands in pockets, watching the traffic go round.

The cinema is younger than it looks settled. It opened in 1999 in the middle of the Bullring roundabout, a sunken traffic island reached by subways that had spent the previous decade as one of London's best-known homeless encampments — "cardboard city" — cleared shortly before the building went up. Avery Associates wrapped the auditorium in a cylinder of glass to keep the trains and buses out of the sound, and Howard Hodgkin painted a mural, Waterloo Sunset, for the curved wall behind it. The screen inside is among the largest in the country.

Almost nothing about it is romantic, which is why the scene lands. Meeting someone here means climbing out of a pedestrian subway into wind and headlights, in full view of everybody arriving at Waterloo. Do it yourself and you will understand Will's system immediately: a place with four exits, no obligation to sit down, and a bridge you can walk away over.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.