It is the turn of the 20th century. Despite the revolution, our H. G. Wells-inspired Cavorite monopoly is intact, so the antigrav is taken care of; what our steampunk spy anime needs is a posh-looking school.

The London wall restricts us to the east side of the city, and various shots of driving on the steampunk aerial expressways suggest that we’re south of the Thames, quite possibly at an elevated location. The name “Queen’s Mayfair School” is not helpful: Mayfair is too central (just west of Piccadilly Circus) and seems perilously close to the wall. While the school must be fairly convenient to central London, where various Action happens, it needs to also stand on its own private patch of green land, uncrowded by the city.



Conclusion: Queen’s Mayfair is located at what we would today call Dulwich College. It’s not an exact copy of our world today, but the key features of the college match. Pictures after the break.

People commenting on Dulwich say that visiting there is like you’ve left London. The tree-lined streets are lined with low fences, iron chains hanging between whitewashed posts. College Road itself is kept quiet with London’s only operating tollbooth. And here, with plenty of open space, we have a fancy school. With a tower. Let’s check it out on Google.

Embellish this with a few gardens and the style matches episode 1 exactly.





How about the college’s Great Hall?





Things are admittedly imperfect. This particular building doesn’t exist, but vaguely resembles the residence halls just down the street, if they were scaled up several stories.



Nor is there a church just off campus to watch the Morse code signals from the window: it appears they have taken liberties with the school’s clock tower:

They used a different tower, which does not exist, for this scene – presumably to project a rather different aesthetic:



On the whole, the architecture of the central building matches quite well, and the location is fairly compelling, especially considering that the Kingdom of Albion’s territory seems to be squarely focused on the southeast anyway:



Dulwich Academy is nestled up against that solid line, a location that can be seen just to the north of Sydenham Hill and east of West Dulwich on the blue (Southeastern) franchise on the London Connections map here, and west of the Brighton Mainline which can also be seen there:



That rail line is currently operated by the Southeastern franchise as far as Tulse Hill and the Thameslink franchise into London afterwards (observe the awkward crossing at Tulse Hill in the current service pattern; trains through this station are often forced to wait and it’s rather annoying).

Past Ashford, the route mostly follows the southern branch of the London, Chatham and Dover Railway, which takes you into the terminal at Holburn Viaduct:

which is just on the other side of Smithfield Market from the modern day Farringdon station, which was also once the terminal of the Metropolitan Railway. (Through service to the north via King’s Cross was available from the nearby Snow Hill station, built only a few years afterwards.)

Whilst I’m not aware of any single-track or historically-single-track portions of the railway between Maidstone and London, they do sillier things as an excuse for dramatic tension in that episode.

In conclusion, there is an anime, presently airing (one of approximately four I’ve ever watched this way), and its primary setting is just over a mile away from my house, in a random zone-3 suburb of London. That’s … a pretty weird thing to randomly happen in life, I’ve got to say.

Cc: @dulwichcollege, @dulwichdiverter.