“[It’s] in the middle of nowhere on a flat piece of tarmac. I really only wanted the tarmac because it had a bitumen [asphalt] road. At least I’d have a bitumen road to begin with. And then I built the whole thing out there. We built a whole city block,” says Ralph. Indeed, they brought London’s Soho neighborhood to life from the ground up, the center of the action being a book store owned by the angel Aziraphale. Filling it with books was as large of a task as building it, and the whole undertaking was created only (mild spoiler alert!) to be burned down in the end.

Gabriel paying a visit to Aziraphale’s bookshop. Photo: Chris Raphael

Thankfully, to source around 7,000 throwaway books from across Europe, Ralph had a set decorator he could count on—his wife, Bronwyn Franklin. “She is sort of the unsung hero,” he says. “To find books that we could burn that weren’t necessarily damaging some fantastic literal tome, we had to really find a whole lot of books we could disguise and make look like antique books. She found some other beautiful items for the shop, like the antique cash register. My God did she get some beautiful things. And then we set fire to things. Controlled fire, but still fire.”

Two of the show’s concept artists (of which Ralph and Franklin’s son was one; another son was a standby prop builder) spent three weeks making the used books look like they belonged in an angel’s bookshop. Then, the space was outfitted with gas burners and flame bars to create the fire. “We had to build a special fire retardant material so that we could build certain things so they couldn’t blister, and then we could quickly do them up again for a second burn,” says Ralph. “But generally speaking, things do catch fire. We had the fire brigade there putting things out. We also had to blow the front windows out with air and water hoses so that Crowley gets hit and pushed across—it’s just a big, big effect. It was fantastic.”

“Visual effects is a tool that needs to be weaved into the fabric of what we are producing,” says Ralph. Photo: Nuke

Ralph’s attention to detail is evident, and it actually goes even deeper than it seems. “There are a lot of secrets in the design—a lot of buried subliminal stuff,” he reveals, noting that he hopes an eagle-eyed fan will find all the Easter eggs in Good Omens. For now, he’s willing to share just one. “I put Aziraphale’s bookshop on a crossroads of a four-road intersection because of the four horseman of the apocalypse and the four corners of the earth,” he says. “Then I based his bookshop entirely on the design of a compass. And therefore if you look up at the oculus or the skylight on the roof of Aziraphale’s bookshop, it actually is the face of a compass. On the mezzanine level are big brass letters that say ‘north,’ ‘south,’ ‘east,’ and ‘west.’ His office is sitting under the east side, and he was the guard at the eastern gate in Eden.”