Locations included Trafford Park for the refugee camp and Altcar Training Camp, Liverpool for the "Erstwhile" site.
It was also announced that the series would be directed by Simon Cellan Jones.įilming began in Manchester on 22 October 2018 and was completed on 17 March 2019. In October 2018, it was announced that Emma Thompson had joined the cast as Vivienne Rook (who shares a name with another of Davies' characters, a journalist in the Doctor Who episode " The Sound of Drums"), alongside Rory Kinnear, T'Nia Miller, Russell Tovey, Jessica Hynes, Lydia West, Ruth Madeley, and Anne Reid. Davies noted that he had been aiming to write the drama series for almost two decades. In June 2018, the BBC announced that Russell T Davies would write Years and Years, which was described as "an epic drama following a family over 15 years of unstable political, economical and technological advances".