This movie was shot in the actual house on the street where the events took place, Gloucester Crescent in Camden Town. Some of the same people still lived there when the star prop arrived, decades later.
Producer and director Nicholas Hytner told The Guardian that, while filming in Camden Town, the crew arrived on-set one morning "to find the van had been broken into, and that two people had spent the weekend inside it having a good time with each other." This necessitated the removal of all of the van's contents, which had been dirtied up for artistic reasons, to be "deep-cleaned, and then made filthy again".
At the Hay Festival on May 27, 2015, screenwriter Alan Bennett said "The story told by this film took place forty and more years ago and Miss Shepherd is long since dead. She was difficult and eccentric, but above all, she was poor. And these days, particularly the poor, don't get much of a look in. Poverty is a moral failing today as it was under the Tudors. If the film has a point, it's about fairness and tolerance and however grudgingly helping the less fortunate, who are not well thought of these days. And now likely to be even less so."
During one montage showing the passage of several years, Miss Shepherd (Maggie Smith) decorates her van with Union Jacks and pictures of Queen Elizabeth II. This means it is 1977 (the year of the queen's silver jubilee).
The real Margaret E. Fairchild, later Mary Teresa Sheppard, was born on January 4, 1911 in Hailsham, Sussex.