The 355|Billingsgate Market — A Fight Staged on a Wet Floor at Four in the Morning

The best action scene in The 355 happens among the fish. The market brawl was shot at Billingsgate, the United Kingdom's largest inland fish market, and the location gives the sequence everything a soundstage cannot fake: standing water, stacked polystyrene boxes, forklifts moving through the frame on their own business, ice underfoot, and a floor that is genuinely hard to stay upright on. Watch the actors' feet rather than their hands and you can see the choreography adapting to it.

The market has traded at Trafalgar Way in Poplar since 1982, when it moved out of the Victorian hall on Lower Thames Street that now hosts parties. Roughly a hundred stands and thirty shops work under one roof, and a large share of the country's fresh fish still passes within arm's reach of somebody standing on that concrete.

It is open to the public, which is the unusual part. Tuesday to Saturday, four in the morning until half past eight, closed Sundays, Mondays and most bank holidays. Arrive by half five if you want to see it trading rather than washing down. Wear boots you do not mind ruining and a warm layer, because the hall is refrigerated and the wet reaches the door. Children under twelve are not allowed on the trading floor.

Do not leave it too long. Traders are due to stay until at least 2028 before the move to Albert Island, and then the room where that fight was staged stops being a fish market.

Location photo via Wikimedia Commons.