Where was ITV's Passenger filmed and is Chaddar Vale a real place?

Passenger introduced us to the community of Chadder Vale and set up some seriously unsettling things to come, but you might be intrigued to know where the show was filmed and if this village is actually a real place.

Written by Broadchurch star Andrew Buchan, ITV’s Passenger is a comedy-thriller with a mysterious and unsettling edge to it. DI Riya Ajunwa, who used to work for the Metropolitan police, is disturbed when Chadder Vale local Katie Wells goes missing, only to reappear the next day as if nothing had happened. This is certainly how the local community would like to be left - but Riya can’t understand their response. 

The relative outsider soon faces a series of shocking crimes and equally odd and unnerving occurrences but it remains to be seen if she’ll get to the bottom of what’s really going on. Alongside the questions posed by this intriguing premise, the Passenger filming locations might also have sparked a few questions amongst fans. The small town setting adds to the atmosphere of the drama and you might well be wondering where Passenger was filmed - and, just as importantly - if Chadder Vale actually exists.

Where is Passenger filmed?

Passenger is filmed in the North of England, just like where Vera season 13 was filmed and where Platform 7 was filmed. The filming locations included Cornholme near Todmorden, as confirmed previously by ITV. The village north of Manchester reportedly stood in for the village and the streets were reportedly covered in fake snow to tie in with the wintry setting of Passenger. Other Passenger filming locations are said to be Oldham and Bolton and the Mercury Hotel in Westhoughton.

The pub in Cornholme, The Glen View Inn, apparently stood in as the pub that we see in the ITV comedy thriller, The Dog and Duck, though the exterior shots were filmed at The White House in Rochdale.

Speaking to Manchester Evening News, location manager for the series, Danny Newton revealed that they looked at many villages with a specific geographic feature in mind for their final choice.

"We looked at lots of different villages, because it was described in the script as having these looming hills, to give that feeling of isolation to the characters that live there," he explained. "There's a bread factory which is integral to the story and a forest, so we searched high and low driving around for weeks looking at different places."

It seems that he happened upon Cornholme as the perfect location just by chance as he drove between two villages and realised this was what he’d been looking for.

He said, "I saw all these cobbled streets and looming hills, it was just past Todmorden on the border of Lancashire, with all these lovely cobbled streets, it's beautiful in its own right with all these beautiful old terraces. Cornholme is one of those places that feels undiscovered - even some people in the local council didn't even know about it."

Passenger is set in the Lancashire village of Chadder Vale and so it makes sense that the filming locations reflect this Northern England setting. In the ITV thriller, DI Riya Ajunwa moved to the village with her husband to be nearer his family. Years later he’s left and she’s still living there, but is not quite yet part of the community which seems to be afraid of something she just can’t put her finger on and which she might potentially be better off never discovering. 

Is Chadder Vale real?

The village of Chadder Vale isn’t a real place - and you might well be a little relieved given the mysterious goings on so far in Passenger which don’t bode well for the rest of the ITV drama’s six episodes. Fans might be forgiven for thinking it could be an actual place as the name Chadder Vale might conjure up an instant picture of an English town or village.

The name does have a similarity to Cheddar - a very real village in Gloucestershire - and to places which have ‘Vale’ in their names, like Marshwood Vale and Whatton-in-the-Vale. A Vale is simply a valley that runs between two pieces of land, typically hills, and often contains a river. There are several real life Vales in the UK, including the Vale of Evesham in Worcestershire and the Vale of the White Horse in Oxfordshire and the Vale of Glamorgan in Wales.

Passenger continues on ITV1 on Sundays and Mondays at 9pm and all episodes are available to stream now via ITVX.