Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes is set to return to ITV with an adaptation of his historical novel Belgravia.
The six-part series – a tale of scandal and intrigue set in 1840s London, around three decades before Downton – will explore tensions between the rich and the nouveau riche. It will go into production with Carnival films (who also produced Downton) in the coming months, Deadline reports.
Based on the 2016 book that Fellowes drip-fed chapter by chapter, week by week, via an app, Belgravia starts out at a ball days before the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, where the daughter of a newly wealthy couple named the Trenchards meets and falls in love with Edmund Bellasis, the heir of one of Britain’s most prestigious families. The bulk of the action takes place 25 years later, where the events of that evening still reverberate.
The novel’s website described Belgravia as “the story of a secret. A secret that unravels behind the porticoed doors of London’s grandest postcode.” In the absence of sales or download figures, it is hard to ascertain whether the serialised novel’s juicy secrets captured the imagination – but its Twitter following (which at its peak hit the heady heights of 854) suggests not.
Fellowes is adapting the novel himself, alongside the Downton Abbey movie, which will be released in September. The TV version of the story of the aristocratic Crawley family and those who served them was watched by 10.5 million people at its peak. Fellowes is also currently working on The Gilded Age, a period drama for NBC, as well as The English Game for Netflix, the origin story of football, plus a drama about the Rothschild banking dynasty.
ITV were unable to comment.
