Any rat who spots the Trance crew on the horizon would be well advised to abandon the sinking ship at once: a swath of destruction has followed the team, filming a psychological thriller, across London.

Virtually every site it has chosen for location shooting is either being redeveloped or demolished.

The last glimpse of many of the landmarks, including a west London office tower, a palatial academic building in Kensington, a block of flats, and the oldest purpose-built gymnasium in England, will be when the film gets its cinema and Sky television release next winter.

The fate of London's most inspiring locations highlights a growing problem for film-makers wanting to work in the capital: Many of its most atmospheric and popular locations are threatened with the wrecker's ball.

Its dark, narrow, cobbled streets, the old houses and industrial buildings of King's Cross, Spitalfields market and Borough market have all appeared in hundreds of films and television dramas.

In all three locations, the local people who have colonised the run-down buildings are fighting last-ditch battles against massive commercial redevelopment.

At King's Cross, some listed and many historic buildings are due to disappear in one of the biggest new developments in Europe, financed by P&O.

Only a third of Spitalfields market will survive if plans for a giant office and retail development, which has faced legal challenges at every step, goes ahead.

At Borough, Railtrack's plans for a new track, to relieve some of the worst rail congestion in the country, would punch through the market and demolish dozens of buildings, including a listed pub and shops.

"It is becoming a real problem," Ian Thomson of the Film Council said. "The most extreme example recently is probably From Hell, the Jack the Ripper film starring Johnny Depp, which is just being completed.

"They simply could not find anywhere in London to film it, so they ended up virtually rebuilding a whole swath of the east end in Prague, and it was still cheaper and easier to do it that way."

The council recently established a £6m regional fund, to encourage areas - including London - to bid for film work.

In New York, where the mayor will cheerfully close down an entire street and send the police in to help out, location shooting is a major industry. In Britain, and particularly in London, filming is viewed with much suspicion, and applicants face endless bureaucracy to get permits. London's loss, however, is other regions' gain.

"London is really being left behind here," Mr Thomson said. "Liverpool is really going for it now." Liverpool and Manchester have recently been used as doubles for the capital. Liverpool has also just played New York during prohibition times in Al's Land, a US film about Al Capone now in post-production; Glasgow doubled as Manhattan during the Edwardian era in The House of Mirth.

Director Joe Ahearne, whose previous creations include This Life and the stylish vampire thriller Ultra Violet, said that the city's tendency to sacrifice some of its most atmospheric locales only struck his crew when they were filming a scene in Trafalgar Square, where Mayor Ken Livingstone has declared war on the pigeons.

"We suddenly realised we were probably the last ever film crew that would be able to do that classic Trafalgar Square pigeons shot," he said. "The feed-seller had gone, and the remaining pigeons were already pretty hungry.

"We only had to shoot our actor walking across the square, but he was virtually dive-bombed by the pigeons."

Ahearne's favourite location was a bright, lofty building in King's Cross, originally built as an gymnasium in 1860 for the local German community, now doomed as part of the area's redevelopment.

"It is getting more and more difficult, both to get permission to film here, and to find the sort of buildings we need. The Americans still do great in London, but they always rely on the old cliched shots, the red bus going past Big Ben. Getting a real London atmosphere in a film is now almost impossible."

His film is a psychological thriller involving the theft of one of Goya's paintings from a leading auction house. Part of it was filmed at the National Gallery.

"They were very helpful - but we didn't like to tell them about the fate of some of the other locations we've used," Ahearne said.