Although the new season adds in a genuine ’80s star, The Terminator’s Linda Hamilton, it’s really a return to the show’s beginnings, and that includes the setting. After some recent travels, we’re back with old friends in the little town of Hawkins, revisiting some familiar haunts while also discovering new parts of the neighborhood we’ve all come to know so well.
Here, we dig into the questions you’ll be asking when you watch, and run through all the major locations from each season, ready for our final visit.
Is Hawkins from Stranger Things a real place?
No, Hawkins was invented by series creators the Duffer Brothers as a classic all-American small-town backdrop, in the style of every Steven Spielberg or Joe Dante movie from the ’80s. In reality, it’s filmed in a series of small towns skirting Atlanta, Georgia—the state that became one of the most popular locations around the time Stranger Things began nine years ago, home to everything from The Walking Dead and Ozark up to recent hits such as horror breakout Weapons, Marvel’s Thunderbolts, The Naked Gun remake and TV comedy Chad Powers.
The notional heart of Hawkins is Jackson, a town south-east of Atlanta that gave the production a readymade, unreconstructed classic America. This provides Melvald’s General Store (really the former Jackson Drug on 2nd Street), where Joyce (Winona Ryder) works at the start of the show, the Public Library (in fact Butts County Probate Court on 3rd Street) and the local cinema, the Hawk Theater (really another empty lot on Oak Street).
Can you visit Stranger Things filming locations?
You certainly can. Though there’s no single official tour, a quick search will find numerous locals ready to show you round, or you can just head to Jackson and find the locations yourself—the town has even added giant QR codes outside the buildings featured in the show for extra info. Before heading further afield from Jackson, it’s worth noting that most of the family homes we know are privately owned—and some distance away in East Point, to the south-west of Atlanta. If you’re discreet, you can catch most of them along the same road, Piney Road Drive, though the interiors are all recreated at Atlanta studio Screen Gems (and Steve’s house, home to the infamous pool party where we last saw unlucky Barb, is in Riverdale, directly south of Atlanta). Also in East Point is the Hawkins General Hospital—though what we’re seeing is actually the First Baptist Church—and the interior of the library, at the Old East Point Library.
