Top Gear production to move to Bristol from 2022

Top Gear is presented by Freddie Flintoff, Chris Harris and Paddy McGuinness

The team that makes the BBC's Top Gear will move from London to Bristol from 2022, the corporation has announced.

The long-running show will continue to use Dunsfold Aerodrome in Surrey for filming, and its presenters will still shoot around the UK and the world.

But the production team will be based in Bristol, which is currently home to shows like Countryfile and Antiques Roadshow plus the Natural History Unit.

In April, the BBC announced plans to move more staff out of London.

The motoring show's 33rd series will be the first to be made in Bristol.

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Hannah Wyatt, one of the BBC entertainment executives, said: "Our Bristol hub is an already incredibly successful and vibrant production base that makes many of our highly popular returning factual entertainment series and blue-chip natural history titles.

"So the Top Gear team will be in very good creative company. It's an exciting move for the show."

Earlier this year, presenter Chris Harris - who fronts Top Gear alongside former cricketer Freddie Flintoff and comedian Paddy McGuiness - told the BBC the show had got "too carried away" with foreign trips.

"Always having to go further and further away to Timbuktu or wherever you want to go, maybe we got a bit too carried away with that in the past," he said.

"Top Gear is a show that people expect to be filmed abroad at times, but I think in the new world, after Covid, maybe we won't go abroad as much as we did before. That's not a bad thing, because we all hate airports."