Cycling along Parks Road on Sunday morning beneath a shower of falling autumn leaves, I was plunged on an instant into 18th-century England. Ahead of me in Catte Street stood two four-wheeled carriages, their paintwork matched in lustre by the coats of the black horses harnessed to them. Tyre tracks in the dirt surface of the road led towards two more coaches. Around milled crowds of people — cowled women in wide, ground-sweeping skirts; bewigged men in tricorn hats, frock coats, knee-breeches and buckled shoes.

There was little mystery about what was going on here: another leading role for Oxford in a film. As you can see elsewhere in The Oxford Times today, this one is called Belle and stars Gugu Mbatha Raw, from Witney. She plays Dido Elizabeth Belle (c1761-1804), the first woman of African ancestry to be admitted — albeit not to the fullest extent — into English high society. The daughter of a West Indian slave by Admiral Sir John Lindsay, she was brought up by Lindsay’s uncle, the Earl of Mansfield (the Lord Chief Justice), at Kenwood House in Hampstead. Wikipedia notes, though, that she was not permitted to dine with the family.

I was impressed to see on Sunday how much gen on the film was available to curious onlookers at the shoot. An informative letter from location manager Adam Richards was prominently displayed on a lamppost, and members of the crew were happily explaining what was going on to anyone who asked.

I didn’t bother asking, confident that I could rely on our news team here to ferret out the facts. Sunday lunch awaited, and I pedalled back to prepare it, musing as I went about some notable Oxford shoots at which I had been present.

These included one on the other side of the Radcliffe Camera in April 1985 where director Barry Levinson was shooting Steven Spielberg’s Young Sherlock Holmes, with Nicholas Rowe as the sleuth-to-be and Alan Cox as the juvenile Watson. On this occasion it was not dirt but snow (actually firefighters’ foam) that covered the road surface. “Turning the warmest day of the year into a winter’s scene is just elementary for the movie makers of today,” I reported archly in the Oxford Mail.

Five years earlier, I was present as preparations began at Mansfield College for the filming there of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, one of the biggest disasters in movie history (though one reads every so often that its huge artistic merits are about to be recognised at last in some new cut).

After the box office bonanza of The Deer Hunter, Cimino had a licence to spend, spend, spend — and duly spent. Production costs soared to $44m. When the film flopped (grossing a mere $3m in the US), it took United Artists — and Cimino’s reputation — with it.

In Oxford, some of the cash was lavished on turning Mansfield’s quad into a leafy American campus where characters played by Kris Kristofferson and John Hurt — later to be on opposite sides of the Johnson County cattle war of 1892 — had met as students. Trouble was, this was March, and there were no leaves to be seen in Mansfield’s quadrangle, even if there had been a tree — which there wasn’t.

Enter, on a lorry with two mobile cranes, the trunk and branches of a 60ft beech, to be placed in position at the centre of a now-vanished lawn. The leaves? These arrived next, ready for glueing on the branches.

“It must be another of those student pranks,” muttered an elderly women to her friend as we watched the rigmarole. This gave me an ideal opening for my report.

My first, and in some ways most memorable, Oxford shoot was in October 1976 at New College where the director Fred Zinnemann was filming scenes for Julia, about the alleged lifelong friendship between writer Lillian Hellman and anti-Nazi fighter “Julia”. (Very alleged, for rather like last week’s Gray Matter ‘star’ Laurens van der Post, Hellman was a notorious fabulist. Zinnemann said of her: “Lillian Hellman in her own mind owned half the Spanish Civil War, while Hemingway owned the other half. She would portray herself in situations that were not true. An extremely talented, brilliant writer, but she was a phony character . . . My relations with her were very guarded and ended in pure hatred.”) I had been told by the film’s publicity team that New College was a closed set on which I would not be welcome. But I turned up anyway, spotted Mr Zinnemann, asked him if he minded my being there, and was pleased to learn that he did not. “Just make sure you don’t accidentally get in the movie.”

Filming in Oxford, where Julia — briefly a student — had (allegedly) been visited by Hellman, was intended to last only one day. In the event it took three, because overcast October skies (know about those?) resulted in the city looking less than its best.

For Vanessa Redgrave, later to win a Best Support Oscar as Julia, this merely meant extra time to flog her Workers’ Revolutionary Party pamphlets to the crew. For Jane Fonda, who was nominated for but failed to win Best Actress Oscar as Hellman, it was all a terrible bore. One afternoon, a door beside the Warden’s Lodgings flew wide and a forlorn figure emerged to scream: “Fray-ed, I wanna go home . . .”

Thirty-six years on, I hear her still.