In pictures: BBC in Sussex town filming for new series of The Gold

Shooting took place on the blustery seafront at St Leonards on Wednesday afternoon. These pictures were taken by local photographer Marie Richardson, who said: “The two actors on the bench, filmed eating fish and chips, are Charlotte Spencer and Emun Elliott. They looked frozen with the wind and cold.”

Filming also took place outside the White Rock Hotel, opposite the pier where a red telephone box was used as a prop. There was also a 1980’s style Mini Metro police car parked up for the shot.

Warrior Square, at St Leonards, and pedestrianised George Street, in Hastings Old Town, were also used as locations for filming.

Based on real events, The Gold is a dramatised version of the 1983 Brink’s-Mat gold heist where around £26 million worth of gold was stolen from a security warehouse near London’s Heathrow Airport.

At the time, it was believed to have been the most lucrative gold heist ever, with the amount stolen equating to around £93 million in today’s money.

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.

A release date for when the second series of The Gold will be aired has not been revealed yet.

Hastings 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.

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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