Pop culture · November 2, 2026

Puzzle #25 answers

The five places from Where Was It? Pop culture #25, and the story behind each one.

1. 01

   Books

   Professor Lidenbrock and his nephew set off for the centre of the Earth down the crater of this Icelandic volcano.

   Snæfellsjökull, Iceland

   

   Snæfellsjökull is a 700,000-year-old glacier-capped stratovolcano at the western tip of Iceland's Snæfellsnes peninsula. In Jules Verne's 1864 novel, the explorers enter the Earth through its crater.

   64.807, -23.776

2. 02

   Music

   The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air's theme tells how Will Smith's character grew up in the west of this city, where Smith himself was born.

   Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

   

   Will Smith, born in Philadelphia on 25 September 1968, found fame as a rapper before The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Billie Holiday and Hall & Oates also have Philadelphia roots.

   39.953, -75.164

4. 03

   Anime

   In Makoto Shinkai's 5 Centimeters per Second, Takaki's snowbound train journey to see Akari ends in this city north of Tokyo.

   Tochigi, Japan

   

   Tochigi is a city in Tochigi Prefecture in the northern Kantō region. In Makoto Shinkai's 5 Centimeters per Second (2007), Takaki's long, snowbound train ride to meet Akari ends at a station there.

   36.382, 139.734

5. 04

   Books

   Sherlock Holmes investigates a spectral hound haunting the Baskerville family on this moorland in south-west England.

   Dartmoor, Devon, UK

   

   Dartmoor is an upland moor in southern Devon, a national park of 954 km² since 1951. Arthur Conan Doyle set The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and the Holmes story Silver Blaze there.

   50.567, -4.000

6. 05

   Books

   Dan Brown's Angels & Demons opens with a murder and stolen antimatter at this European particle physics laboratory.

   CERN, Meyrin, Switzerland

   

   CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, straddles the French–Swiss border near Geneva. Angels & Demons (2000), the novel that introduced Robert Langdon, begins there.

   46.234, 6.049