SEAMONSTERS

GB
2011
1hr 37mins
Dir: Julian Kerridge
Starring: Jack McMullen and Rita Tushingham

The friendship between two teenage boys living in a seaside town is torn apart by the arrival of a mysterious young girl

This drama was largely filmed in Worthing, West Sussex, and features a ride on an unusual train in the form of the 10¼in-gauge Diddly’s Miniature Railway in Brooklands Park, East Worthing. The railway opened as a normal miniature gauge tourist ride in 1965, but was later marketed as the Diddly Miniature Railway with two child-like trains operating called Diddly Dum and Diddly Dee. The line closed in 2018 after the local authority released its ‘masterplan’ for the park, confirming there was no place for the railway. There are also more conventional scenes filmed outside Worthing station and Finsbury Park Underground station in London, but little of either is actually seen.

Jack McMullen sits on a bench outside Worthing station
Jack McMullen walks out of the tunnel at the main station of the Brooklands Park Miniature Railway
Jack McMullen and Rita Tushingham on the miniature railway in Brooklands Park, East Worthing
This is the Diddly Dee train. The locomotive was built in 2009, and is basically a Bo-Bo diesel-hydraulic beneath its brash exterior. Its brother, Diddly Dum, had been running on the line since 1985.
The train does another circuit of Brooklands Park lake, which has now been redeveloped as part of a science and adventure park.
This is Station Place, Finsbury Park, and the canopy above the entrance to the Underground station is just visible top right