Gentleman Jack cast descend on York for series two filming

The cast and crew have been seen at locations in the precincts of York Minster, Fairfax House, College Green and the Castlegate area, and Suranne Jones, who plays Anne Lister, was spotted in costume on the set today.

Fairfax House, a Georgian merchant's house on Castlegate, was once a gentlemen's club and has been owned by the York Civic Trust, who operate it as a museum, since the 1980s. It featured in the first series of Gentleman Jack as the interior of Lister's former lover Vere Cameron's London home.

St William's College - which was formerly a lodging house for trainee priests and dates back to the 15th century - was transformed into the milliner's shop of hatmaker Miss Wilks, and crew members could be seen replacing the sign above the building with a 19th-century replica.

The college has had several prominent owners during its history - after the Church originally sold it, it was used by a residence by the Howard family, Earls of Carlisle, while Castle Howard was being built, and later by the Lane Fox family, Lords Bingley, whose main seat is at Bramham Park.

It was restored and sold back to the Church in 1912. Since then, it has been used as a conference and banqueting space by the Minster, but there are plans to convert it into offices, meeting rooms and a cafe.

Street scenes for the first series of Gentleman Jack were also filmed in York, and buildings including Grays Court Hotel and Holy Trinity Church on Goodramgate - where Anne Lister 'married' Ann Walker - were used as locations.

Anne Lister had close connections to York, despite having grown up on the Shibden Hall estate in Halifax, then a considerable distance away from the city. She was sent to board at a girls' school in King's Manor, the former seat of the Council of the North that is now occupied by the University of York. She formed many lifelong friendships at the school, and met some of her early lovers there. One was Isabella Norcliffe, the daughter of a colonel and landowner who grew up at Langton Hall, near Malton. The house, which is now owned by a property developer, has also been used for filming this autumn, as Isabella will be introduced as a new character in the second series.

The cast have also returned to Shibden Hall, the BBC/HBO production's flagship filming location. They were rumoured to have been spotted at Sewerby Hall, near Bridlington, but site owners East Riding Council denied that any filming had taken place there.

The second series of Gentleman Jack examines the period after Anne Lister and her same-sex partner and fellow heiress Ann Walker began living together as a couple at Shibden, her ancestral home, while also trying to run the estate and the family's business interests in a male-dominated society.