Films and TV shows have created a glamorous "Notting Hill" version of the UK's capital city. A new Lena Dunham series pokes fun at the stereotypes Americans believe about the country.

When Jessica, the heroine of Lena Dunham's new series, Too Much, first arrives from New York to live in London, she thinks she's heading to live on a country estate; the idyllic Jane Austen or Bridgerton-era kind she's seen on screen. Instead, Jessica (played by US comedian Megan Stalter) is dropped off on an East London council estate (a block of social housing). So begins another tale of a young American discovering Europe, but unlike Emily in Paris, packed with dazzling locations and couture outfits, Jessica discovers vast housing projects, grimy pubs and sweaty gigs. Does this series show the reality of modern London?

Since the 1990s, some of the most successful British films set in London have presented the so-called "Notting Hill" version of the city; a name stemming from the eponymous 1999 Richard Curtis film starring Hugh Grant, Julia Roberts and Rhys Ifans. It glamourised the area, whose colourful houses still draw a steady stream of tourists and Instagrammers (to the extent that frustrated residents started painting them black and grey.)

Curtis also wrote the romcoms Bridget Jones's Diary, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Love Actually, which he also directed. These films, alongside the successful Paddington franchise of the last decade, have depicted a more idyllic, upper-middle-class version of the capital, its characters often living in West London's stucco-fronted houses. Recent hit Netflix series such as The Crown and Bridgerton have also shown off the city's grandest landmarks.

Of course, London has been portrayed in different ways throughout cinema history, including its bombed-out ruins after World War Two, in films such as 1949's Passport to Pimlico. The city's edgier side has been evident in cult classics such as Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971), featuring a brutalist housing estate in Woolwich, or 1987's Withnail and I, shot in Notting Hill and Camden, home to the protagonists' legendary squalid apartment. Performance, a 1970 gangster drama directed by Nicolas Roeg and starring Mick Jagger, was also set in a crime-ridden Notting Hill of the time. Most recently, the hit Apple TV series Slow Horses, starring Gary Oldman as the head of a group of MI5 misfits, has been filmed in urban East London.

However, international recognition of films such as Notting Hill, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Bridget Jones remains high, 30 years after some of them were made. Notting Hill is regularly named by critics as one of the best romantic comedies ever made, as is Four Weddings and a Funeral. These stories have also been enormously successful at the box office – the Bridget Jones series of films has made just

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