London On Film PDF

LO N D O N
ON FILM
E D I T E D BY PA M H I R S C H
& CHRIS O’ROURKE
Screening Spaces
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Department of Film, Television, and Theatre
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Pam Hirsch · Chris O’Rourke
Editors
London on Film
Editors
Pam Hirsch Chris O’Rourke
University of Cambridge University of Lincoln
Cambridge, UK Lincoln, UK
Screening Spaces
ISBN 978-3-319-64978-8 ISBN 978-3-319-64979-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64979-5
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Contents
Introduction: Film Londons 1

Pam Hirsch and Chris O’Rourke
‘Local Film Subjects’: Suburban Cinema, 1895–1910 15

Roland-François Lack
Glamour and Crime: The London Nightclub in Silent Film 27

Mara Arts
Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936): Conspirators and Bombs

in Actual, Literary and Filmic London 41
Pam Hirsch
‘A Relic of the Bad Old Days’: Hollywood’s London

in None but the Lonely Heart (1944) 57
Mark Glancy
London Can Take It: Documentary Reconstructions

of the City 73
Michael McCluskey
v
vi Contents
From the Docks to Notting Hill: Cinematic Mappings

of Imperial and Post-Imperial London 87
Eleni Liarou
Wanting More: Gender, Space and Desire in Darling

and Four in the Morning 103
Rose Hepworth
Queer London on Film: Victim (1961), The Killing of Sister

George (1968) and Nighthawks (1978) 117
Chris O’Rourke
Housing Policy and Building Types: From High Hopes to

High-Rise 133
Amy Sargeant
A Melancholy Topography: Patrick Keiller’s London 147

David Anderson
From Dogpower to Ratropolis: London in Animated Film 163

Rui Tang and David Whitley
Skateboard City: London in Skateboarding Films 177

Iain Borden
Shaun of the Dead and the Construction of Cult Space in

Millennial London 193
Paul Newland
The Cinematic Revival of ‘Low London’ in the Age

of Speculative Urbanism 205
Malini Guha
London in Transition: Sites of Melancholy 221

Charlotte Brunsdon
Contents vii
East–West: Reflections on the Changing Cinematic

Topography of London 239
Ian Christie
Index 253
Editors and Contributors
About the Editors
Pam Hirsch has recently retired as Lecturer in Literature and Film

History and Theory at the University of Cambridge, though she con-
tinues to research and publish. Her most recent book on film is The
Cinema of the Swimming Pool (2014) co-edited with Christopher Brown.
Her articles on film have appeared in Feminist Media Studies and the
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television.
Chris O’Rourke is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television History at

the University of Lincoln. He has published on various aspects of British
cinema, including articles in Film History and Early Popular Visual
Culture. His first book, Acting for the Silent Screen: Film Actors and
Aspiration between the Wars, was published by I.B. Tauris in 2017.
Contributors
David Anderson is a Ph.D. researcher and Teaching Assistant in the

Department of English Language and Literature at University College
London, where his interests include the representation of London in
literature and film. He was a major contributor to Dorling Kindersley’s
The Sherlock Holmes Book (2015), has written for publications includ-
ing Prospect and The Point, and is a contributing editor at Review 31.
He is also writer-in-residence at the Cob Gallery. The chapter included
ix
x Editors and Contributors
in this volume draws on research carried out for his Ph.D. thesis, enti-
tled ‘Affective Topographies: Landscape and Subjectivity in the Work of
Patrick Keiller, W.G. Sebald and Iain Sinclair’.
Mara Arts is currently completing Ph.D. research on the representation
of London nightlife in the British cinema and popular press of the inter-
war period, at Birkbeck, University of London. She has previously stud-
ied and taught film at University College London. Mara is a founding
member of the Ephemeral Cities research group, which researches and
writes about the urban condition by reading cities both in, and as, texts
and cultural representations.
Iain Borden is Professor of Architecture and Urban Culture, and
Vice-Dean Education, at The Bartlett, University College London.
Iain’s authored and co-edited books include Forty Ways to Think
About Architecture (Wiley, 2014), Drive: Journeys through Film, Cities
and Landscapes (Reaktion, 2012), Bartlett Designs (Wiley, 2009),
Skateboarding Space and the City (Berg, 2001/new edition forthcom-
ing), The Unknown City (MIT, 2001) and InterSections (Routledge,
2000).
Charlotte Brunsdon is author of Television Cities: Paris, London,
Baltimore (Duke University Press, 2018), Law and Order (British Film
Institute, 2011) London in Cinema: the cinematic city since 1945 (British
Film Institute, 2007), The Feminist, the Housewife and the Soap Opera
(Clarendon Press, 2000) and Screen Tastes (Routledge, 1997). She has
been Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded Projection Project
(2014–2018) at the University of Warwick, where she is Professor of
Film and Television Studies.
Ian Christie is a film historian, curator and broadcaster. He has written
and edited books on Powell and Pressburger, Russian cinema, Scorsese
and Gilliam; and contributed to exhibitions ranging from Film as Film
(Hayward, 1979) to Modernism: Designing a New World (V&A, 2006)
and The Unexpected Eisenstein (GRAD 2016). The 2006 Slade Professor
of Fine Art at Cambridge University, he is a Fellow of the British
Academy, a past president of Europa Cinemas, and currently Professor of
Film and Media History at Birkbeck College.Mark Glancy is Reader in
Film History at Queen Mary University of London. He is currently writ-
ing a biography of Cary Grant and has served as the editorial consultant
to the documentary Becoming Cary Grant (Yuzu Productions, 2017).
Editors and Contributors xi
His publications include the books When Hollywood Loved Britain: The
Hollywood ‘British’ Film, 1939–1945 (Manchester University Press,
1999), The 39 Steps: A British Film Guide (Tauris, 2003) and Hollywood
and the Americanization of Britain, From the 1920s to the Present (Tauris,
2014). With James Chapman and Sue Harper, he is a co-editor of The
New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches (Palgrave, 2007).
Malini Guha is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Carleton
University, Canada. Her research and teaching are broadly concerned
with spatiality and the cinema, with an emphasis on post-colonial and
post-imperial modes of mobility, migration, displacement and settlement.
Recent publications include a chapter on cinephilia and topophilia in pop-
ular Bengali cinema published in Global Cinematic Cities: New Landscapes
in Film and Media (2016) and From Empire to the World: Migrant London
and Paris in Cinema, published by Edinburgh University Press in 2015.
Rose Hepworth is a graduate of the University of Cambridge’s Screen
Media and Cultures programme and was awarded her Ph.D. from
Cambridge for a thesis assessing the figure of the avatar as self-portrai-
ture in narratives by women across media platforms. She has authored
chapters in The Cinema of the Swimming Pool (eds P. Hirsch and C.
Brown, 2014), and Feminist Erasures (eds K. Silva and K. Mendes,
2015). As a Research Associate with the Computational Creativity
Group at Goldsmiths, University of London, Rose worked on a three-
year EU-funded project investigating computational fictional ideation.
Roland-François Lack is Senior Lecturer in French and Film at
University College London. He is the creator of The Cine-Tourist web-
site, devoted to the relation between place and film, and is currently
writing a monograph on the places of early French cinema.
Eleni Liarou teaches film and television history at Birkbeck, University
of London. She has published on issues of immigration and cultural
diversity in British film and television. She is one of the coordinators of
the Women’s Film and Television History Network and a member of the
Raphael Samuel History Centre.
Michael McCluskey is a Lecturer in English and Film Studies at the
University of York. He is working on a monograph on 1930s British doc-
umentary and is the co-editor of Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical
Intervention to be published by Edinburgh University Press.
xii Editors and Contributors
Paul Newland is Reader in Film Studies at Aberystwyth University.

He was previously a post-doctoral research associate at the University
of Exeter, where he worked on the film producer Gavrik Losey’s archive
in the Bill Douglas Centre. He is author of British Films of the 1970s
(Manchester University Press, 2013) and The Cultural Construction of
London’s East End (Brill, 2008), and editor of British Rural Landscapes
on Film (Manchester University Press, 2016) and Don’t Look Now:
British Cinema in the 1970s (Intellect, 2010).
Amy Sargeant teaches for Tisch School of the Arts, New York
University. She has published extensively on British Cinema of the silent
and sound periods, being author of British Cinema: A Critical History
(2005, second edition forthcoming) and The Servant (2011). With
Claire Monk she co-edited British Historical Cinema: History, Heritage
and the Costume Film (2002). Her latest publication, with Palgrave, is
Screen Hustles, Grifts and Stings.
Rui Tang is a Ph.D. candidate at the Centre for Children’s Literature
of Cambridge University. She is particularly interested in fictional urban
images in animation and in different forms of children’s literature. She
is currently doing her research project and thesis on the city in animated
feature films.
David Whitley is a Senior Lecturer at Cambridge University, where he
teaches film, poetry and children’s literature. He is particularly interested
in the way the arts offer different forms of understanding and engage-
ment with the natural world. His most recent book is The Idea of Nature
in Disney Animation (2012).
List of Figures
‘Local Film Subjects’: Suburban Cinema, 1895–1910

Fig. 1 The proximity of the rural and the suburban: A car turns
into a countryman’s cart in The ‘?’ Motorist (1906) 23
Glamour and Crime: The London Nightclub in Silent Film
Fig. 1 The façade of the Piccadilly Club in Piccadilly (1929) 33
Fig. 2 Prince Ivan introduces himself to Jill in The Pleasure Garden
(1925) 36
Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936): Conspirators and Bombs in Actual,
Literary and Filmic London
Fig. 1 Blown up by his own bomb 42
Fig. 2 Roast beef at Simpson’s, in Sabotage (1936) 49
Fig. 3 Stevie, already a victim, in Sabotage (1936) 51
‘A Relic of the Bad Old Days’: Hollywood’s London
in None but the Lonely Heart (1944)
Fig. 1 Although Ernie Mott (Cary Grant) eventually receives
an attractive new suit of clothes from his Ma
(Ethel Barrymore), in the film’s early scenes he wears
ill-fitting clothing and appears dishevelled.
(None but the Lonely Heart [1944]) 63
Fig. 2 Director Clifford Odets insisted that the vast and very expensive
street set should be appropriately drab rather than picturesque.
(None but the Lonely Heart [1944]) 65
xiii
xiv List of Figures
London Can Take It: Documentary Reconstructions of the City

Fig. 1 A tree grows amid a bomb-damaged building in London
Can Take It! (1940) 78
Fig. 2 Circulation through the city in London Can Take It! (1940) 80
Fig. 3 Signs of containment in A Diary for Timothy (1946) 81
From the Docks to Notting Hill: Cinematic Mappings
of Imperial and Post-Imperial London
Fig. 1 A unifying figure. Paul Robeson in Song of Freedom (1936) 90
Fig. 2 A misunderstood outsider. Earl Cameron in
The Heart Within (1957) 96
Wanting More: Gender, Space and Desire in Darling
and Four in the Morning
Fig. 1 Diana racing around Trafalgar Square in Darling (1965) 110
Fig. 2 A joyride up the Thames in Four in the Morning (1965) 114
Queer London on Film: Victim (1961), The Killing of Sister
George (1968) and Nighthawks (1978)
Fig. 1 Mickey and PH survey the scene at the Chequers bar
in Victim (1961) 121
Fig. 2 George and Childie (right) celebrating in fancy dress
at the Gateways club in The Killing of Sister George (1968) 123
Fig. 3 Dancers at Glades disco in the final sequence
of Nighthawks (1978) 127
Housing Policy and Building Types: From High Hopes
to High-Rise
Fig. 1 The tower block surrounded by others under construction
in High-Rise (2015) 139
Fig. 2 H. insists on the demarcation between public and private
space in Exhibition (2013) 144
A Melancholy Topography: Patrick Keiller’s London
Fig. 1 Homeless men at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London (1994) 151
Fig. 2 ‘London Stone’, nestled in a wall by Cannon Street station,
in London (1994) 154
Fig. 3 The stagnant tower of 1 Canada Square in London (1994) 157
From Dogpower to Ratropolis: London in Animated Film
Fig. 1 Cruella’s car—emblem of ostentatious consumption
in 101 Dalmations (1961) 167
Fig. 2 The alternative London—built around underground sewers
rather than the Thames—in Flushed Away (2006) 172
List of Figures xv
Skateboard City: London in Skateboarding Films

Fig. 1 John Sablosky performing a frontside aerial at Skate City’s
‘Black Bowl’. Slow-motion sequence from Hot Wheels (1978) 180
Fig. 2 Benny Fairfax (left) and Chewy Cannon (right) in front
of the Undercroft, in Adidas’ Away Days (2016) 188
Fig. 3 DIY constructed skatespot in Sydenham, South London,
by With Section. So What? (2016) 190
Shaun of the Dead and the Construction of Cult Space
in Millennial London
Fig. 1 Walk one. Shaun of the Dead (2004) 198
Fig. 2 Walk two. Shaun of the Dead (2004) 198
The Cinematic Revival of ‘Low London’ in the Age
of Speculative Urbanism
Fig. 1 James Bond (Daniel Craig) faces historical London
landmarks in Skyfall (2012) 215
London in Transition: Sites of Melancholy
Fig. 1 The Vanishing Street (1961): The new rears up behind
the old 226
Fig. 2 The Vanishing Street (1961): Two women discuss news
in the Jewish Chronicle 228
Fig. 3 Seven Summers (2012): The coots in their kingdom 234
East–West: Reflections on the Changing Cinematic Topography
of London
Fig. 1 ‘The people you do not see’: The shadowy lives of immigrants
in Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things (2002) 247
Introduction: Film Londons
Pam Hirsch and Chris O’Rourke
Alongside the official proceedings at the London 2012 Olympics, the

broadcasters BBC and Channel 4 commissioned a series of short films
for the concurrent London 2012 Festival. The decision to commission
four very different films by filmmakers as diverse as Lynne Ramsey, Mike
Leigh, Max & Dania and Asif Kapadia might have been designed as a
sort of polar opposite to the most famous Olympic film in history, the
one made by Leni Riefenstahl for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, which
presented a view of the city defined by a single ideology. Instead, the
2012 project deliberately presented a number of very different Londons.
These featured dysfunctional but compassionate families (Leigh’s A
Running Jump), freerunners and BMX-ers (Max & Dania’s What If),
and aerial shots of the city interspersed with news footage of the 7/7
bombings and the 2010 riots (Kapadia’s The Odyssey). Between them, the
films present both real and imagined London spaces, including the new
Olympics site in Stratford, the iconic financial district of the Docklands,
P. Hirsch (*) 
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
e-mail: ph211@cam.ac.uk
C. O’Rourke 
University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK
© The Author(s) 2017 1

P. Hirsch and C. O’Rourke (eds.), London on Film, Screening Spaces,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64979-5_1
2 P. Hirsch and C. O’Rourke
a modernist housing estate in the north-London borough of Camden

and the inside of a black cab.
The film activity surrounding the 2012 Olympics serves as a useful
starting point to introduce this volume for several reasons. Firstly, it is a
reminder of the enduring power of film to reflect on, and mediate, life in
the British capital. There has been a close relationship between London
and the moving image since the 1890s, when pioneer filmmakers first
began to document the city. In the twenty-first century, film continues
to shape the image of London in important ways, for both domestic
and (perhaps especially) international audiences, who may first encoun-
ter London as a cinematic space before they ever set foot on its streets.
Secondly, the commissioning of films designed to commemorate a par-
ticular event in London’s cultural life reminds us that cinematic repre-
sentations of the city are produced under specific circumstances and for a
variety of purposes. The essays that we have brought together in this col-
lection include case studies of films intended, among other things, as star
vehicles, political statements and government propaganda. As our con-
tributors show, these different aims have left their mark on the resulting
images of London.
Finally, like the commissioners at BBC and Channel 4, we have aimed
for a deliberately eclectic approach to the subject of London on film.
Individual essays focus on examples from a variety of periods and genres
of filmmaking, adopting very different theoretical and methodological
approaches. We have arranged these essays in loose chronological order.
This is with the aim of suggesting how cinematic representations of the
city have responded to particular moments in its history, as well as high-
lighting how films set in London have drawn on previous examples to
develop certain recognisable conventions and preoccupations. However,
we have not attempted to put forward a comprehensive account of
London’s image on film, and we are equally interested in the way ‘film
Londons’ challenge and contradict each other as we are in the ways in
which they reinforce broader cultural assumptions about the city and
its people. Because of this, the London that emerges from the follow-
ing essays, and from the films they examine, is variously glamorous and
grimy, cosmopolitan and parochial, ultramodern and rooted in the past,
inclusive and deeply divided.
It is not only the contrasts in cinematic representations that make
London an interesting and rich focus for this collection; there is a clear
pay-off in studying cinematic London based on the city’s place in both
INTRODUCTION: FILM LONDONS 3
world and film history. When filmmakers first turned their cameras on
London, it was the self-proclaimed ‘heart’ of a vast British Empire. Many
of the earliest films made about the city added to its reputation as an
imperial hub. Filmmakers paid homage to London’s grand monuments,
closely following the example of tourist guidebooks. They helped to
increase the audience for official displays of pageantry staged in the capi-
tal, such as royal jubilees and coronations (Cinquegrani 2014, 43–84).
More than a century later, following the collapse of the British Empire
in the years after World War II, London has become crucial to debates
about a new type of globalisation. According to the sociologist Saskia
Sassen, writing in the 1990s, London is one of a handful of privileged
‘world cities’, whose function is to oversee the workings of an increas-
ingly international flow of capital (Sassen 1991, 3). This transformation
from imperial, to post-imperial and now multicultural ‘world city’ has
also been registered by filmmakers, who have used films variously to cele-
brate, question and critique what London means in the modern era (see,
for instance, Guha 2015).
At an institutional level, too, London’s internationalism has reinforced
its central position within British cinema and its status as a destination
for foreign filmmakers. Many of the first British film studios were built in
or around London. Early production and distribution companies quickly
gravitated to the city’s West End, to be near important entertainment
and financial districts. In recent decades, substantial foreign investment,
especially from America, has produced new studios, such as those owned
by Warner Bros. in the London commuter-belt of nearby Hertfordshire.
The area around London has become the production base for world-
wide blockbusters, notably the James Bond and Harry Potter franchises,
as well as commercially successful costume dramas and romantic com-
edies. Such films have, in turn, circulated a version of British (or English)
national identity to global audiences, often concentrating on a particu-
larly ‘London-oriented’ middle- or upper-class social milieu (Higson
2011, 28). As several of our contributors show, this trend is part of a
much longer history, in which London has served as a setting for foreign
production, notably by Hollywood studios. The British cinema has pro-
duced influential visions of London, but so too have filmmakers coming
from a variety of national and international contexts.
As a collection of essays about a single urban location, this book con-
tributes to a growing academic literature dedicated to analysing the rela-
tionship between cinema and the city, which now includes numerous
edited volumes (see, for example, Clarke 1997; Penz and Thomas 1997;
Shiel and Fitzmaurice 2001; Shiel and Fitzmaurice 2003; Webber and
Wilson 2008; Koeck and Roberts 2010). Like Mark Shiel, we recognise
that cinema has ‘been constantly fascinated with the representation of
distinctive spaces, lifestyles, and human conditions of the city’, and that
filmmakers have found equally distinctive ways to utilise the tools of the
medium, in order ‘to capture and express the spatial complexity, diver-
sity, and social dynamism of the city’ (Shiel 2001, 1). One of the things
that unites the different approaches taken by contributors to this volume
is an interest in the way that film, as opposed to other cultural forms,
mediates the spaces of London through specifically cinematic frame-
works of genre and narrative, codes of cinematography and editing, and,
in some cases, the meanings generated by the dynamics of stardom and
audience reception. We are also interested in how particular cinematic
modes, ranging from popular blockbusters to essay films, documentaries
and newer forms of video-making, have inflected the representation of
urban space.
Previous collections on the cinematic city have addressed a pur-
posely broad geographical range. However, some places, such as Paris,
Berlin, New York and Los Angeles, have been particularly well served by
the existing scholarship. Until relatively recently, London has not been
among these privileged cinematic cities, although essays by Mike Mason
(2001) and Chris Petit (2008), several of the contributions to Gail
Cunningham and Stephen Barber’s collection London Eyes (2007), and
the catalogue for a Museum of London exhibition about ‘London on
Film’ (Sorensen 1996) started to map out the contours of London’s cin-
ematic portrayal. Charlotte Brunsdon’s book London in Cinema (2007)
brought a sharper academic focus to this topic, and her arguments and
examples provide a touchstone for many of the essays in this collection.
Brunsdon has continued to shed light on the way that London settings
function as part of film narratives, drawing particular attention to the
importance of genre (Brunsdon 2009). The current collection seeks to
move these conversations further. In common with Brunsdon’s work,
we aim to highlight London’s centrality as a location within an array of
films, many falling outside the emerging ‘cinematic-city’ canon of 1920s
city symphonies, film noirs and social-realist dramas. This collection can
also be seen as a response to Brunsdon’s argument, set out in her over-
view of recent scholarship on the subject, in favour of ‘the importance of
the particular, the historical and the specific in relation to films, cities and
disciplines’ (Brunsdon 2012, 227). By focusing on a single location, the

following essays build on the insights put forward by previous studies of
film’s relationship with the urban environment. But they also question
how useful the ‘cinematic city’ is as an overarching category, showing
how film depictions of London are often engaged with very local identi-
ties, histories and debates, even as they bring such constructions of place
to a wider audience.
We have chosen to arrange the essays in this volume in a chrono-
logical order that is necessarily loose. We begin with Roland-François
Lack’s detailed investigation of the early filmmaker Robert Paul’s
use of London locations, and move towards Malini Guha’s analysis of
London settings in the recent James Bond films Skyfall (2012) and
Spectre (2015). While some essays focus on an individual film or cycle of
films, others discuss examples that span several decades. The collection
ends with essays by Charlotte Brunsdon and Ian Christie that examine
trends in London filmmaking over a longer time period, and that bring
together many of the concerns explored by other contributors, including
the relationship between London films and nostalgia and the persistent
attractions of particular London neighbourhoods to filmmakers from the
silent period to the present day. In the remainder of this introduction, we
identify some of the other themes and approaches that connect individ-
ual essays. In particular, we consider the importance of London’s distinct
topography to a number of our contributors, before looking at the treat-
ment of specific types of London location in films discussed across the
essays. Lastly, we consider how filmmakers have engaged with transfor-
mations in and of London, which may suggest fruitful avenues for future
research.
Topographies and Typologies
London has been constantly changing since the earliest films of the
1890s. Its population has grown, shrunk and grown again in the inter-
vening century, and the city has expanded geographically as well. Within
this change, London has retained many of its older local identities, and
new neighbourhoods and ways of life have developed, often existing side
by side. The opening voiceover to Ealing Studios’ wartime drama The
Bells Go Down (1943) claims that ‘London isn’t a town, it’s a group of
villages’, and films of London have helped to preserve or redefine this
patchwork view of the city in the popular imagination. In recognition of
this, Brunsdon chose to structure her 2007 book spatially, focussing on

how various areas of London have been represented in films. However,
she is careful to point out that there is a complicated and fluid relation-
ship between the real, material neighbourhoods of London (or any
city) and the sense of place created in cinema (Brunsdon 2007a‚ 15).
Similarly, Neil Mitchell introduces his guide to London movie locations
by arguing for the double nature of places featured in films: ‘The East
End, Camden Town, the more exclusive enclaves of Knightsbridge and
Mayfair, the licentious streets of Soho and the South Bank are all distinct
physical environments which also exist concurrently as ideas in the imagi-
nation of visitors, residents and film audiences alike’ (Mitchell 2011,
6–7). As our contributors show, different areas and aspects of London
are also made meaningful in films through their relationships with each
other. Filmmakers have regularly used contrasts between the city’s neigh-
bourhoods to suggest, for instance, changes in a character’s fortunes,
moral outlook and state of mind, or to underline distinctions of class,
gender and ethnicity.
The division between West End and East End, which was solidified in
the Victorian era (White 2008, 5–6), remains one of the most prevalent
and resilient structuring devices in films set in London, appearing across
multiple periods and genres of filmmaking. Often, the West End in
films functions as part of what Brunsdon has called ‘landmark London’
(2007a, 21), encompassing the Parliament buildings in Westminster and
Buckingham Palace, as well as other details associated with a picture-
postcard view of the city, such as double-decker buses and red telephone
boxes. A number of essays reveal the continuing potency of this part
of the city in the cinematic imagination and in constructions of British
national identity. Pam Hirsch notes the importance of London’s West
End in Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936), in which the terrorists’ choice to
blow up Piccadilly Circus—a place that advertised itself as ‘the centre of
the world’—acts as a reminder of what was potentially under threat in
the political upheavals of the 1930s. Michael McCluskey’s study of war-
time documentaries, including Listen to Britain (1942), shows how a
similar use of ‘landmark London’ was deliberately mobilised by filmmak-
ers at the Crown Film Unit during and after the Blitz. Guha finds an
echo of these earlier examples in the James Bond film Skyfall, this time
in the context of the ‘war on terror’, when, having defeated the forces of
global terrorism, Daniel Craig’s Bond is shown on a rooftop overlook-
ing the nineteenth-century London of Big Ben and the Old War Office
Building—a view steeped in nationalist and imperial history. Comparable

views are used to introduce the romanticised, reassuringly middle-class
image of London created in Disney’s 101 Dalmatians (1961), discussed
by Rui Tang and David Whitley in their essay on animated films set in
the city.
As London’s main commercial and entertainment district, the West
End is often associated in films with glamour and consumption. In addi-
tion to films set predominantly in nightclubs, discussed below, other
examples contain more fleeting depictions of the West End as a space
of leisure. In the ‘Swinging London’ film Darling (1965), examined
by Rose Hepworth, the carefree Diana Scott (played by Julie Christie)
is shown driving round Trafalgar Square in her boyfriend Miles’s open-
top car. In Hepworth’s analysis, this scene confirms how at home Diana
feels in the city’s public spaces, including those that are usually gendered
as male. In the ‘social problem’ film Victim (1961), analysed in Chris
O’Rourke’s essay on representations of queer London, the West End is
an equally permissive but also more oppressive space, associated not so
much with newfound freedoms as with sexual ‘deviance’ and criminality.
Scenes shot on location in the Salisbury pub near Covent Garden reveal
a seedy underworld of persecuted homosexual men (at a time when male
homosexuality was still illegal), as well as blackmailers operating in the
supposedly respectable heart of the metropolis.
In contrast to the West End, the East End in films has often (but not
always) been presented as the home of a more authentic, working-class
London, and it retains these connotations in spite of increasing gentri-
fication in the area (see Newland 2008). Crime in the East End is typi-
cally shown to be less shocking and more prosaic, linked to narratives of
grinding poverty and a desire to escape miserable surroundings. This is
especially obvious in recent gangster films, as well as in the post-World
War II cycle of London films noir, including They Made Me a Fugitive
and Ealing’s It Always Rains on Sunday (both 1947). An important,
but previously overlooked precursor to these films is None but the Lonely
Heart (1944), made by the Hollywood studio RKO, and the subject of
Mark Glancy’s essay. In the film, the lead character, Ernie Mott (played
by the usually glamorous Cary Grant), expresses anger at the way that
the poor are forced to scrabble a living, so that only joining a criminal
gang seems to offer an escape. As Glancy shows, this deliberately stylised
Hollywood vision of fog-bound, 1930s London was criticised by some
British reviewers for looking too unrealistic and too gloomy for wartime
audiences to appreciate, although its depiction of the East End now

seems highly influential.
In other films discussed by our contributors, the East End is made dis-
tinctive on film by its immigrant communities, often associated with the
London Docks. In Piccadilly (1929), an important film for both Mara
Arts’ and Ian Christie’s essays, the Chinese community in Limehouse
becomes the locus for anxieties about the city’s increasingly multiracial,
or ‘cosmopolitan’, identity between the wars. If that film uses the East
End to suggest that there is a more-or-less unbridgeable gap between
middle-class white Londoners and working-class people of colour, the
Paul Robeson film Song of Freedom (1936), discussed by Eleni Liarou,
shows the Docks and its ethnic diversity in a more positive light. Both
Liarou and Christie explore how filmmakers in the post-World War II
(and post-Windrush) era have attempted to remap some of the older dis-
tinctions between East End and West End, in order to reflect London’s
changing demography. This has involved, for instance, drawing attention
to the experiences of black Londoners in West London, in films such
as Sapphire (1959), Pressure (1976) and Kidulthood (2006), or to the
British-Asian community in North London, as in Bend It Like Beckham
(2002). In contrast to films that focus on the East End as a space of
racialised tension, Brunsdon’s essay reflects on how The Vanishing Street
(1961) represents the loss of ethnic identity, in this case by juxtaposing
the richly textured details of everyday life in Jewish Whitechapel with the
arrival of bulldozers and a new modernist housing development.
Several essays in this collection look beyond inner London to the sub-
urbs. Lack’s essay argues that London cinema has always been suburban,
as well as urban, using the early filmmaker Robert Paul’s engagement
with his local Muswell Hill, then at the northern fringes of the city, as
an example. As Lack’s meticulous study shows, Paul not only used the
move to the suburbs to expand his studio facilities; he also used local
streets (some of them still being built on) as a backdrop for his experi-
ments with film narrative. In Lack’s view, films such as The ‘?’ Motorist
(1906) register the material changes taking place in Victorian and
Edwardian London, as well as thematising the strange and sometimes
amusing proximity of urban and rural ways of life. Paul Newland’s essay
takes a very different approach to the nearby suburb of Crouch End, the
setting for the zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead (2004). For Newland,
the film successfully captures (and satirises) the aimlessness felt by many
inhabitants of ‘millennial’ London, as well as turning a deliberately
unremarkable suburban street into a place of fan pilgrimage. Newland’s

essay suggests that suburban, ‘millennial’ and ‘cult’ versions of London
on film would all reward further consideration.
If many of the essays in this collection explore particular areas of
London, others focus on specific types of spaces. Housing is a concern
for McCluskey and Brunsdon, in their discussion of the representation of
bomb-damaged and demolished homes, and for Hepworth, who exam-
ines the gendering of interior spaces in Darling and Four in the Morning
(both 1965). In her discussion of both films, Hepworth shows female
protagonists oppressed and contained in domestic situations, notwith-
standing their differing social class positions. Amy Sargeant offers an
overview of the way films set in London have represented housing types,
as affected by changing government policy since the 1980s. Social-realist
filmmakers, in particular, have taken a critical stance on, for example,
the Thatcher government’s ‘Right to Buy’ policy affecting council-
house tenants. In Mike Leigh’s High Hopes (1988), Mrs. Bender is the
last remaining council tenant in her terrace, facing prejudice from her
new middle-class neighbours next door. As Sargeant’s essay also shows,
other filmmakers have used less realist genres to question urban plan-
ning theories by taking them to an extreme. Her discussion of High-Rise
(2015), adapted from J.G. Ballard’s dystopian novel of the same name,
puts the film in the context of architectural debates about the possibil-
ity of planned society. In the film, the central tower block becomes a test
case for whether buildings can contain the class tensions of the modern
metropolis. The bleak vision that it presents suggests that the anxieties
about the vast inequalities of wealth in London that Ballard was satirising
in the 1970s have in no way dissipated.
Nightclubs also feature as a significant location in a number of essays.
The ‘Piccadilly Club’ in the film Piccadilly is discussed by both Christie
and Arts. Christie is interested in the way the West End–East End divi-
sion is paralleled in the upstairs-downstairs worlds of the nightclub. Arts,
on the other hand, discusses Piccadilly as part of a cycle of films made in
the 1920s that attempt to show the glamour of nightclubs, whilst con-
forming to the moralistic guidelines of the British censors. Nightclubs
emerge from these films as pleasurable spaces, but they are also impli-
cated in crime and sexual transgression. O’Rourke also focuses on the
space of the nightclub in his discussion of The Killing of Sister George
(1968) and Nighthawks (1978), connecting these films to debates within
the lesbian and gay community about the commercialisation of the city’s
gay scene. Together these essays start to sketch out a history of the way
London’s nightlife has been imagined on film, and how this intersects
with histories of gender and sexuality.
Transforming London
As many of the essays in this collection make clear, films set in London
are in a constant dialogue with existing and often stereotyped images of
the city, whether these are constructed by earlier filmmakers or in other
cultural forms, such as novels, newspapers and television. Several of our
contributors focus on films that deliberately attempt to make the city
appear unfamiliar. In doing so, these films raise questions about what
London is and to whom it belongs. Iain Borden’s investigation of skate-
boarding videos shows how there is a permanent tension between the
high-cultural, modernist spaces of, for example, London’s Southbank
Centre, and the skaters (and street artists) who have repurposed the
space underneath the building. As both Borden’s essay and Newland’s
discussion of fan videos produced in response to Shaun of the Dead show,
new technologies are creating opportunities for amateur, as well as pro-
fessional, filmmakers to put their own stamp on the city.
Some modes of filmmaking may be particularly capable of show-
ing a transformed London. Tang and Whitley argue that, through the
conventions of animated films (including the use of anthropomorphic
animal protagonists), London’s cinematic image can be played with, pas-
tiched and criticised in a variety of ways. In Flushed Away (2006), the
‘Ratropolis’ of the sewer mirrors the London above ground, but, in
Tang and Whitley’s interpretation, it also critiques the city’s consumer
culture by showing how copious human junk has been recycled to cre-
ate a miniature society underground. Christie’s essay describes a similar
but more overtly political critique in the modern-day ‘social problem’
film Dirty Pretty Things (2002). As Christie notes, the filmmakers delib-
erately sought out locations that had not previously appeared in films
set in London, including hotel basements and underground carparks, in
order to reveal a ‘shadow’ city populated by exploited illegal immigrants.
Similar to the microcosm offered by the tower block in High-Rise, the
hierarchical layout of the hotel, in particular, provides a visual trope for
entrenched societal inequalities.
Physical damage has the power to make the city appear strange, and
various filmmakers have used ruined spaces in London to consider the
city’s history and its future possibilities (see Brunsdon 2007b). Both
Anderson and McCluskey discuss a shot in Patrick Keiller’s essay film
London (1994) in which a bombed office block, caught in the IRA’s
renewed bombing campaign in mainland Britain, is shown abandoned.
McCluskey links this to similar moments in wartime documentaries
where the surreal aspects of the Blitz experience are brought home to
viewers by showing spaces that have been left empty or else repurposed,
as in scenes of people sleeping on London Underground platforms. In
these instances, the city is shown to be resilient, adaptable and capable
of transforming itself in a way that underlines the necessary wartime
message—contained in the title of the early World War II film London
Can Take It! (1940)—of hope and perseverance. Anderson, meanwhile,
connects Keiller’s image of the bombed office block to another shot in
London showing Canary Wharf, a symbol of the redeveloped Docklands
financial district, which has been deliberately obscured behind greenery,
as if it has already been turned into a ruin. Anderson reads these shots
together as an example of the film’s absurdist attack on rampant eco-
nomic speculation and mismanagement of London in the late twentieth
century. In his view, London is a film which invites viewers to reflect on
the ephemeral nature of power and wealth. In her discussion of Seven
Summers (2012), a film about the transformation of the Lea Valley in the
run-up to the Olympics, Brunsdon also examines the capacity of films to
consider the impact of change in the city, without necessarily being sub-
sumed by what Anderson calls ‘uncritical nostalgia’.
In a Britain facing an uncertain (at the time of writing), post-Brexit
future, films about London and its identity can take on different, unex-
pected meanings. In the wake of the 2016 referendum on Britain’s mem-
bership of the European Union, the film critic Barry Norman speculated
that the Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico (1949), in which a small
patch of London is declared to be part of the Dukedom of Burgundy,
and thus is no longer subject to the post-war regime of economic auster-
ity, might help us to predict what life will be like in a post-Brexit world
(Norman 2016). Whether or not films can help us understand the way
that London will be in the future, the essays in this collection demon-
strate the variety of ways in which London has been imagined in the past,
and suggest that film continues to shape our perceptions of the city and
its people in significant ways.
References
Brunsdon, Charlotte. 2007a. London in Cinema: The Cinematic City since 1945.
London: British Film Institute.
———. 2007b. Towards a History of Empty Spaces. Journal of British Cinema
and Television 4 (2): 219–232.
———. 2009. Introduction: Screen Londons. Journal of British Cinema and
Television 6 (3): 165–177.
———. 2012. The Attractions of the Cinematic City. Screen 53 (3): 209–227.
Cinquegrani, Maurizio. 2014. Of Empire and the City: Remapping Early British
Cinema. Oxford: Lang.
Clarke, David B. (ed.). 1997. The Cinematic City. London: Routledge.
Cunningham, Gail, and Stephen Barber (eds.). 2007. London Eyes: Reflections in
Text and Image. Oxford: Bergahn.
Guha, Malini. 2015. From Empire to World: Migrant London and Paris in the
Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Higson, Andrew. 2011. Film England: Culturally English Filmmaking since the
1990s. London: I.B.Tauris.
Koeck, Richard, and Les Roberts (eds.). 2010. The City and the Moving Image:
Urban Projections. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Mason, Mike. 2001. Naked: Social Realism and the Urban Wasteland. In
Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, ed. Mark
Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice, 244–253. Oxford: Blackwell.
Mitchell, Neil. 2011. London: City of the Imagination. In World Film Locations:
London, ed. Neil Mitchell, 6–7. Bristol: Intellect.
Newland, Paul. 2008. The Cultural Construction of London’s East End:
Urbanisation, Modernity and the Spatialisation of Englishness. Amsterdam:
Rodopi.
Norman, Barry. 2016. Can Passport to Pimlico Predict Post-Brexit Britain? Radio
Times, July 9. http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2016-07-09/can-passport-
to-pimlico-predict-post-brexit-britain. Accessed 3 Mar 2017.
Penz, François, and Maureen Thomas (eds.). 1997. Cinema and Architecture.
Petit, Chris. 2008. The Tattered Labyrinth: A Selective A-Z of London Cinema.
In Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis, ed.
Andrew Webber, and Emma Wilson, 226–233. London: Wallflower Press.
Sassen, Saskia. 1991. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Shiel, Mark. 2001. Cinema and the City in History and Theory. In Cinema and
the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, ed. Mark Shiel and
Tony Fitzmaurice, 1–18. Oxford: Blackwell.
Shiel, Mark, and Tony Fitzmaurice (eds.). 2001. Cinema and the City: Film and
Urban Societies in a Global Context. Oxford: Blackwell.
Shiel, Mark, and Tony Fitzmaurice (eds.). 2003. Screening the City. London:
Verso.
Sorensen, Colin (ed.). 1996. London on Film: 100 Years of Filmmaking in
London. London: Museum of London.
Webber, Andrew, and Emma Wilson (eds.). 2008. Cities in Transition: The
Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis. London: Wallflower Press.
White, Jerry. 2008. London in the Twentieth Century: A City and Its People.
London: Vintage.
‘Local Film Subjects’: Suburban Cinema,
1895–1910
Roland-François Lack
A plaque affixed in 1996 to an ordinary house on Park Road in Chipping

Barnet, a northerly suburb of London, commemorated the filming of
‘the first British Moving Picture here in February 1895’ by Birt Acres,
‘Inventor and Pioneer Cameraman’. Another plaque on an ordinary
house in another North London suburb, Muswell Hill, remembers the
nearby film studio and laboratories built in 1898 by Robert W. Paul,
‘Inventor, Cinematographer, Producer and Exhibitor’. On a theatre in
Walton-on-Thames is a plaque that reads: ‘From 1899–1924 this build-
ing formed part of the original studios of Cecil Hepworth whose Rescued
by Rover was made here.’ In May 2017 two plaques were unveiled at the
sites of early film studios in Walthamstow. To my knowledge these are
the only plaques in suburban London that commemorate the first years
of English cinema. There should be many more.
London cinema was suburban from the start. Early English film pro-
duction was cosmopolitan and internationalist but also local. Robert
Paul in Muswell Hill and Cecil Hepworth in Walton-on-Thames were
embedded in those districts, not only as residents and employers but
R.-F. Lack (*) 
University College London, London, UK
e-mail: r.lack@ucl.ac.uk

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64979-5_2
16 R.-F. Lack
also as producers of images of their suburban environs. They were, in all

respects, local filmmakers. This chapter takes Robert Paul as an initiator
and exemplar of cinema’s interaction with the city’s suburbs in the first
years of studio production.
Paul’s 1907 catalogue promised to supply ‘Local Film Subjects’.
This meant that any customers who had taken film subjects in their
own locality could send the negative to his laboratories and have the
film developed. Paul also offered to send out operators to ‘any part
of the world’ to take subjects on behalf of customers (Paul 1907, 2).
He had been catering to customer requests of this kind since at least
April 23rd 1898, when in The Era (23) he advertised ‘Special Pictures
Taken to Order at my New Laboratory, Muswell Hill’. Under the head-
ing ‘Local (British) Films’, his 1902 catalogue makes a point of rec-
ommending locally made films to a broader clientele: ‘A large number
of local pictures have been taken in all parts of Great Britain, and can
be printed to order. Many of these are of use apart from local interest’
(Paul 1902, last page).
I here take ‘Local Film Subjects’ to mean something different, that is,
subjects taken by him and that were local to him. While I like the idea that
the new studio and film works in North London were a hub of world-
wide image circulation, in this chapter I will read them, rather, as a hub
of localised image-making. I am suggesting that we might read other
internationally known centres of image production—Ealing, Islington,
Twickenham, Shepperton, Elstree—in a similar way.
Before moving to Muswell Hill, Paul’s locality was East Central
London, with offices at Hatton Garden and factories at Leather Lane
and Saffron Hill. Lists published by Paul in 1897 (see Herbert 1996,
27–35) include a few subjects taken within reach of these premises
(Blackfriars Bridge, Tower Bridge, Petticoat Lane Market, the docks at
Southwark), and in February 1898 he filmed a clog-dancing competi-
tion in nearby Bow. In effect, however, the centrality of his location
made London as a whole his locality. From Hatton Garden and from the
Alhambra Theatre in Leicester Square, where he exhibited his films, his
reach stretched wide across the city.
The locations of films in Paul’s 1897 lists also include Lambeth,
London Zoo, Hampstead Heath and Herne Hill. An advertisement
in The Era (26 March, 1898, 27), referred to ‘Panoramas of London
Streets &c’, without being specific. A catalogue dated August 1898,
quoted by film historian John Barnes, lists five films that would fit that
‘LOCAL FILM SUBJECTS’: SUBURBAN CINEMA … 17
description: ‘Piccadilly Circus’, ‘Westminster’, ‘Outside the Paragon’,

‘Outside the Oxford’ and ‘Panorama of Holborn’ (Barnes 1996c, 185).
The Paragon Theatre (now the Genesis Cinema) was on the Mile End
Road and the Oxford Music Hall was at the junction of Oxford Street
and Tottenham Court Road. Paul showed films in these and in several
other theatres, as well as at the Alhambra. I would guess that, following
a practice established by the Lumière Cinématographe, Paul made films
of the outside of these theatres in order to show those films inside. In an
immediate sense, then, these film subjects were ‘local’.
John Barnes also mentions a film taken at Trafalgar Square and a film
of snow being shovelled in a West End thoroughfare (Barnes 1996a,
250; Barnes 1996b, 229). Most of Paul’s central London subjects were
familiar from picture postcards of the landmarks, monuments and sights
of tourist London. Paul was fully aware of the city’s visitor attractions. In
1896 (25 April, 17) The Era commented: ‘For some time Mr. Paul has
been “taking notes” of the London streets, and vivid reproductions of
interesting places and incidents have been most acceptably added to the
entertainment at the Alhambra.’ In 1901 Paul published ‘What to pho-
tograph in London’, a brochure for tourists that The Process Engraver’s
Monthly (volume 8, 254) described thus: ‘In the space of a postcard it
gives the things a visitor in a hurry should photograph, with particulars
as to best time of day, whether time or instantaneous exposure is prefer-
able, permits to use a camera, etc.’1
The panoramic vision of London offered in Paul’s early cinematic
output followed a model established by the Lumières, documenting the
world around through scenic vues. Paul very soon introduced variety to
the programme through fiction:
After the show had been running at the Alhambra for a month, Mr. Moul,
the manager, suggested that I should make a short comedy in order to put
a few laughs into the programme of scenic and interest films I was show-
ing. Accordingly we took some of the theatre scenery up on the roof and
built it up in the full glare of the spring sunshine. We also took some of the
actors with us. (quoted in Wood 1947, 102)
The resulting setting for The Soldier’s Courtship (1896), depict-

ing a woodland glade in a park, was topographically unspecific, but
another early fiction that was at one time attributed to Paul evinces a
stronger sense of place. Footpads shows a night-time robbery against
18 R.-F. Lack
a background depicting a clearly recognisable Ludgate Circus. This film

may not, as was once thought, date from 1896, but this is still one of
the earliest film sets to represent an exact location in London. The attri-
bution to Paul has now become very doubtful; had it been by him, the
proximity of Ludgate Circus to Paul’s premises in Hatton Garden and
Saffron Hill would have made this (for me) a satisfyingly ‘local’ film sub-
ject. To compensate, however, we have the several local subjects that
Paul definitely did film in and around Muswell Hill.
When, in 1898, Paul set up his studio at the Newton Avenue Works,
midway between Muswell Hill and New Southgate, it was not with a
view to documenting this vicinity on film. His object was grander: he
meant to revolutionise English filmmaking through the production
of fictional film subjects. An advertisement from October 1898 made
explicit that intent:
The public have been surfeited with Trains, Trams, and ’Buses, and,
beyond a few scenes whose humour is too French in nature to please
English audiences, the capacity of animated pictures for producing
BREATHLESS SENSATION, LAUGHTER AND TEARS has hardly been
realised. The DAY IS PAST when anything in the way of Animated Pictures
will do for an audience. Exhibitors and Managers have been asking for
something New, Distinctive, Telling, and Effective; but, beyond the occa-
sional presentation of Topical Scenes, their demands have not been met.
ALL THIS IS CHANGED, for, during the past Summer a Staff of Artists
and Photographers have been at work in the North of London, with the
object of Producing a series of Animated Photographs (Eighty in Number),
each of which tells a tale, whether Comic, Pathetic, or Dramatic; and pre-
sents it with such clearness, brilliancy and telling effect that the attention of
the beholders should be rivetted. (The Era, 8 October, 1898, 27)
In this same advertisement Paul gives some sample titles—‘The Servant

Difficulty’, ‘The Nursery Scene’, ‘Come Along, Do!’, ‘In the Queen’s
Name’—and promises ‘clever and natural acting’ and no expense spared,
‘with Specially-made Dresses and Backgrounds’. From the surviv-
ing fragment of Come Along, Do! (1898), as well as the descriptions of
‘Comic Pictures’ and ‘Dramatic Scenes’ given in his 1902 catalogue, we
can see that this first phase of innovation through fiction continued in
the line of The Soldier’s Courtship, presenting contemporary subjects in
everyday settings. Georges Sadoul described ‘In the Queen’s Name’, i.e.
The Arrest of a Deserter, as ‘perhaps the first example in English cinema
of the “social” realism that would later be so influential internationally,

especially on Pathé and Vitagraph productions, and then on Griffith’
(Sadoul 1947, 144 [my translation]).
Paul’s reference to specially made backgrounds is the only indication
he gives of a difference made by the use of a studio. Comparisons can
be drawn between Paul’s early studio productions and those of Georges
Méliès, who built his studio in 1897 as a laboratory for the creation of
unreal and imaginary places. As Ian Christie has observed (2004, 164ff.),
by 1901 Paul was rivalling Mélièsian modes of inventiveness, with a sec-
tion in his catalogue devoted to ‘Novel Trick and Effects Films’, but his
dominant mode circa 1898 was social realism, mostly comic but some-
times pathetic, and the spaces created in his studio were, in the main,
humble interiors.
The shift to studio production facilitated the creation of cinematic,
rather than theatrical, tricks and effects, but a more striking difference, to
my mind, is that filming in the studio also led, eventually, to filming out-
side of the studio, in its immediate vicinity. Paul had made fictions in real
locations before: Up the River (1896), a ‘Scene on the River Thames,
showing the rescue of a child from drowning’, is a drama staged on a
stretch of the Thames west of London; A Wayfarer Compelled Partially
to Disrobe (1897) was filmed on open ground in front of some low-rise
buildings, in a park probably. By the time Paul remade The Soldier’s
Courtship as Tommy Atkins in the Park, in the summer of 1898, the
park setting was probably the four-acre grounds of Paul’s new prem-
ises in North London. A pair of films from around 1899, The Bricklayer
and His Mate and Thrilling Fight on a Scaffold, clearly use the prem-
ises as a location, since the catalogue shows images of the same build-
ing under construction as illustrations for both, and the description for
the latter begins as follows: ‘Bricklayers, labourers and carpenters are
seen busily engaged on different portions of the building of PAUL’S
ANIMATOGRAPH WORKS.’
Two other films in the 1902 catalogue appear, from the accompany-
ing illustrations, to draw on the studio’s vicinity for their locations: the
street in A Lively Dispute (1898) and the church in A Gretna Green
Wedding (1899) both look local. (The church could be St James’s on
Friern Barnet Lane and the house is of a type common near the stu-
dio, but I have yet to find the actual house.) It is, however, from 1903
onwards that we can clearly see Paul’s fiction films move from the studio
onto the surrounding streets. Seven of the surviving films show streets
20 R.-F. Lack
near the studio: An Extraordinary Cab Accident (1903), Mr. Pecksniff

Fetches the Doctor (1904), Buy Your Own Cherries (1904), A Victim of
Misfortune (1905), The Medium Exposed (1906), The ‘?’ Motorist (1906)
and The Fatal Hand (1907). On the evidence of illustrations in the
1907 catalogue three now-lost films are local (A Little Bit of Cloth, Blind
Man’s Bluff and Bill Sikes Up-to-Date), and from the descriptions of
other fictions it is clear that several more were shot outside of the studio,
almost certainly in the nearby streets.
This is not an unfamiliar pattern. The same thing happened in the
suburbs of Paris, on a smaller scale with Méliès in Montreuil, on a much
vaster scale with Pathé in Vincennes (see Lack 2018). The progressive
installation of studios for film production in London’s inner and outer
suburbs—Walton-on-Thames (1899), East Dulwich (1899), Mitcham
(1901), Croydon (1904), Ealing (1904), Walthamstow (1910), Merton
Park (1912), Twickenham (1913) and Whetstone (1913)—led naturally
to the presentation on screen of those suburbs, because they furnished
more natural and cheaper settings for fictions with contemporary, every-
day subjects.
Robert Paul moved his facilities to the Muswell Hill area because he
found there cheap land on which to build. His move coincided with the
ongoing transformation of Muswell Hill from recherché rural retreat
into a distinguished modern suburb. When he first came most of the
land was occupied by bourgeois villas in spacious grounds. These were
progressively bought up by entrepreneurs and built on, but by the time
Paul’s studio and works were completed, around 1899, the suburb as
we know it today was still being laid out. The details of its development
are related by local historian Ken Gay in his chapter ‘The New Suburb
Is Born’ (Gay 1999, 53–72). Muswell Hill’s distinctive aspect, ‘so var-
ied in style and so picturesque in architecture’ (The Alexandra Palace
Magazine, 1902, quoted in Long 1993, 60), was not yet apparent, and
until 1902 or so it must have seemed more like a permanent building site
than a desirable residential suburb for the well-to-do middle classes.
Paul’s four acres were not in these desirable parts, at the top of the
hill, but down the northern slope towards New Southgate, in an area
known as the Freehold, a working-class district of low-quality housing
with a few basic shops, a school, two mission churches, several pubs and
a sewage works. The Freehold was initially populated by workers who
had built the nearby Alexandra Palace. As the architecturally distinctive
and generally expensive suburb flourished at the top of the hill, the area
around the Freehold developed as a lower-class district, its inhabitants

‘mainly artisans and casual labourers’.2 The two exteriors of Paul’s 1904
temperance film Buy Your Own Cherries, a pub and a mission church,
both appear to have been taken in the Freehold, in which case the film
would constitute a unique document of a district of which there is
almost no photographic record from that time.
The buildings we see in Paul’s films have nothing of the distinction
or quality associated with Muswell Hill today. Most are modest terraced
houses of a type reproduced all around London and in the suburbs of
other English cities. His suburban films are not, like those he made in
the streets of Central London, ‘vivid reproductions of interesting places’.
There were, indeed, only two ‘interesting places’ near the studio, the
Alexandra Palace and the London County Lunatic Asylum at Colney
Hatch. Paul made some topical films in Alexandra Park, one of which at
least (now lost) showed the Palace itself,3 but the opportunity provided
to make landmark cinema in Muswell Hill was not really taken up by
Paul. In The Unfortunate Policeman (1905) and The Medium Exposed,
two of the surviving fiction films, the Palace can be seen, but just as a
vague silhouette in the distance. A looming building in the recently dis-
covered The Fatal Hand (1907) may also be Alexandra Palace.
The Fatal Hand features a lunatic who has escaped from a fictitious
asylum, ‘Broadhurst’, rather than from the real and local Colney Hatch
which, for obvious reasons, was not available as a location for filming.
Nonetheless, its proximity may have informed the film The ‘?’ Motorist, in
which the delinquents are seen driving along Friern Barnet Road, where
Colney Hatch Asylum was situated, before ascending into the clouds.
Among the buildings they fly over is a passable representation of the
Lunatic Asylum.
In the absence of any other distinguishing features, the places in
Paul’s films register as generic. Local spectators might be able to iden-
tify actual places, but the films’ general British public would register only
that the settings were suburban, and only then if the spectators knew
what the burgeoning suburbs of England’s major cities looked like. For
international audiences, the distinction between suburban and urban
would not be apparent. Overall, for most audiences in this period, the
generic sufficed.
Paul’s films themselves do not always make clear distinctions between
the urban and the suburban. Mr. Pecksniff Fetches the Doctor opens with a
man dressing hurriedly in a studio-made bedroom, then shows him leave
22 R.-F. Lack
a real house on a real street before arriving at the studio-made exterior of

a doctor’s surgery. The real house (Robert Paul’s own, on Colney Hatch
Lane) is suburban, but the doctor’s house is urban, a cartoonish render-
ing of a Harley-Street-type façade. The Unfortunate Policeman opens
outside the shop of ‘Moses Isacson [sic], Watchmaker and Jeweller’,
another cartoonish rendering of an urban façade (somewhat Hatton
Garden-like). The chase initiated in this opening continues in the next
five shots on five real suburban streets, including the same stretch of
Colney Hatch Lane seen in Mr. Pecksmith, outside Paul’s own house.
Each of these anonymous streets, each house, shop, pub, church and
railway station, serves a simple narrative function, but when aggregated
these places present us with a picture of a typical London suburb at a
key moment in its development. If Muswell Hill railway station, as seen
in The Fatal Hand, had been in operation since 1873, almost all other
buildings seen in Paul’s suburban films were no more than ten years old.
Most were newly built—the climax of The Fatal Hand shows the escaped
lunatic climb the scaffolding of a building still under construction. The
first two shots of The ‘?’ Motorist show the car driving along leafy lanes
with no houses in sight, but these apparently rural roads have been sur-
faced, the kerbs laid out and the drainage already installed: these are
streets onto which the suburb is about to expand.
The proximity of the rural is a significant feature of this topography.
A scene set in the countryside could be shot in fields or lanes at little
distance from the studio. Sometimes a film foregrounds the proximity
of rural to suburban. An image in the 1907 catalogue illustrating The
Fakir and the Footpads shows a signpost on a country lane pointing to
Southgate, still a rural village, and Finchley, a developed suburb. The
catalogue description of A Little Bit of Cloth (now lost) announces ‘a real
country scene with fine lady and gentleman walking in a lane’, with as
first illustration a gate by a field; the second illustration, however, shows
the man in the hands of the police, being carried along Colney Hatch
Lane, a thoroughfare with houses and shops. The films depict rural space
at a point of transition to the urban. The catalogue description of The
Unfortunate Policeman refers to ‘a country road’, but what we see in
the film is an already built-up street, with a hoarding at the end adver-
tising land available for further development. A later shot at the other
end of the same street shows another estate agents’ hoarding, a hoarding
also visible in The Medium Exposed. The land behind that advertisement
would be developed in the following decade.
The proximity of the rural to the suburban is fully thematised in The

‘?’ Motorist. The opening shot of the film is now lost, surviving only as
a production still. The catalogue describes a motorist and his lady at the
‘gateway of a villa’. What we see in the still is a standard suburban house
with a small front garden by a narrow pavement—a villa in the most
modest sense of the word. After the two shots showing it on quasi-rural
roads, the motor-car evades a pursuing policeman by driving up the front
of a pub and into the clouds, travelling to the Sun and then onto the
rings of Saturn. The climax shows the car back on earth, where it is sud-
denly transformed into a countryman’s cart, its occupants becoming ‘a
smock-frocked man and his wife’ (see Fig. 1). The pursuers are surprised
at the transformation but do not act as if the presence of country folk in
a cart was itself incongruous.
The scene was shot on Newton Avenue, a road that had been sur-
faced and kerbed but on which no houses had yet been built. In the
Fig. 1 The proximity of the rural and the suburban: A car turns into a country-
man’s cart in The ‘?’ Motorist (1906)
24 R.-F. Lack
background are houses on Sydney Road, the end of a newly built terrace,
with to the left what looks like a field—a solitary horse is grazing there.
The juxtaposition of rural and suburban is an apt setting for the transfor-
mation of car into cart and back again, but the setting itself is deceptive.
At the edge of the field a fence is visible, and in another film from the
same year, The Medium Exposed, we see the field again, with more of the
fence and a view of what is to the left of the field: more housing. The
field is in fact just a vacant lot, awaiting development.
The area in which Paul made his films has left its trace in the films
themselves, but his filmmaking has left almost no trace in the area.
Newton Avenue, the street on which the car in The ‘?’ Motorist is parked
and down which it escapes, was created to give access to the film works
and laboratories and was named by Paul after his enthusiasm for the
great scientist. He also gave the name Newton to the house built for
him on Sydney Road, to which the commemorative plaque is affixed.
Paul stopped film production in 1910 and severed his connection with
the district in 1920 when he moved to Holland Park. The works were
taken over by the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company, which
remained on the site until 1975, at its peak employing about 750 peo-
ple (see Heathfield 2001, 87). No original buildings remain, but the sci-
entific instrument factory is still well remembered in the area. The film
studio, on the other hand, is quite forgotten. The contrast with Cecil
Hepworth’s studios in Walton-on-Thames is striking. Hepworth contin-
ued making films there until 1924, and film production was continued by
others for decades, eventually ceasing with the closure of the Nettlefold
Studios in 1961. A surviving building has become the Cecil Hepworth
Playhouse, and a nearby street has been named Hepworth Way (see
Warren 1995, 173–179; Hughes 2003, 63–76). No street name in
Muswell Hill or New Southgate honours Robert W. Paul, and the plaque
on his house is now entirely hidden by overgrowing wisteria. There is no
street in Barnet named after Birt Acres, and the plaque on the house in
front of which Acres made ‘the first British moving picture’ is, at time of
writing, missing. For a while a local pub, The Banker’s Draft on Friern
Barnet Road, featured as part of its décor many images and texts docu-
menting the history of early filmmaking in the area, with substantial dis-
play panels devoted to Acres and Paul, but the pub closed down in 2013
and the display panels were sold off (they were bought by me).
For the present, the films alone are the site of memory. Among
those that survive, those that show their locality have become useful
documents, not only for local historians but also for film historians,
more and more of whom are focussed on cinema’s relation to place.
Historians of British cinema might usefully invert Paul’s odd reference
to ‘Local (British) Films’ and remember that British films are also always
local. Most historians of London cinema already remember that, as well
as being internationalist, national and urban, this cinema is also subur-
ban. I hope to have shown that a localised reading of suburban repre-
sentations changes them from generic to specific, and changes not just
how we see such places on film but also how we see ourselves as viewers,
because we are then positioned as local or not. That kind of position-
ing applies to the study of London cinema in general, but the suburban
is particularly important because so much London cinema came out of
suburban studios. That began with Paul and Hepworth and reached a
pinnacle of sorts at the studios in Ealing. I have always thought that the
study of Ealing films should begin on the streets of Ealing, Acton and
Brentford. Going further I would argue that the study of cinema and the
city should begin, as cinema did, in the suburbs, where film subjects are
always, for the locals at least, local.4
Notes
1. See:http://www.thecinetourist.net/robert-paul-in-london-tour-guide-
and-film-maker.html.
2. British History Online: Friern Barnet: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/
vch/middx/vol6/pp6-15.
3. See A Switchback Railway (1898). John Barnes reproduces this cata-
logue description of the lost topical film, also from 1898: ‘Striking pano-
ramic picture of all the fun of the fair. Three or four swings, the Alexandra
Palace, show booths, etc., pass across the picture, which is full of life
and movement’ (Barnes 1996c, 180). Paul filmed two airship flights at
Alexandra Palace, in 1903 and 1905.
4. For more on Robert Paul in North London see ‘My Local Filmmaker’:
http://www.thecinetourist.net/my-local-filmmaker.html.
References
Barnes, John. 1996a. The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, 1894–1901, vol.
1. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.
———. 1996b. The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, 1894–1901, vol. 2.
Exeter: University of Exeter Press.
26 R.-F. Lack
———. 1996c. The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, 1894–1901, vol. 3.

Exeter: University of Exeter Press.
Christie, Ian. 2004. The Magic Sword: Genealogy of an English Trick Film. Film
History 16 (2): 163–171.
Gay, Ken. 1999. A History of Muswell Hill. London: Hornsey Historical Society.
Heathfield, John. 2001. Finchley and Whetstone Past, with Totteridge and Friern
Barnet. London: Historical Publications.
Herbert, Stephen (ed.). 1996. Victorian Film Catalogues. London: Projection
Box.
Hughes, Wendy. 2003. Walton-on-Thames. Stroud: Tempus.
Lack, Roland-François. 2018. Lumière, Méliès, Pathé and Gaumont: French
Filmmaking in the Suburbs, 1896–1920. In Screening the Paris Suburbs:
From the Silent Era to the 1990s, Derek Schilling and Philippe Met (eds).
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Long, Helen C. 1993. The Edwardian House. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Paul, Robert W. 1902. Catalogue of Paul’s Animatographs & Films. London.
———. 1907. Catalogue of Selected Animatograph Films. London.
Sadoul, Georges. 1947. Les Pionniers du cinéma, 1897–1909. Paris: Denoël.
Warren, Patricia. 1995. British Film Studios: An Illustrated History. London:
Batsford.
Wood, Leslie. 1947. The Miracle of the Movies. London: Burke.
Glamour and Crime: The London
Nightclub in Silent Film
Mara Arts
Breathlessly Anthony scanned the dancers, scanned the muddled lines trail-
ing in single file in and out among the tables, scanned the horn-blowing,
kissing, coughing, laughing, drinking parties under the great full-bosomed
flags which leant in glowing colour over the pageantry and the sound.
(Fitzgerald 2012 [1922], 271–272)
When we entered, three tired waiters were leaning against an aggressive

yellow wall as if they were presiding over the funeral bakemeats… We sat
in an alcove and ordered ham and eggs. All around the tiny room, sitting
in similar alcoves, were men and women drenched in gloom. The women
looked frayed, the men looked bored. They seemed as though they were
attending a wake in evening dress. (Morton 1931, 168)
The above quotations, from The Beautiful and the Damned and The
Nights of London respectively, give two opposing impressions of inter-
war nightclubs on either side of the Atlantic. The roaring twenties is
a familiar term, which invokes glamorous women, elaborate dresses,
jazz-dancing, and champagne. This image is partly cemented in the
M. Arts (*) 
Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK
e-mail: marts01@mail.bbk.ac.uk

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64979-5_3
28 M. Arts
collective memory through American literature such as Fitzgerald’s, as

well as through Hollywood films. Some Like It Hot (1959), Bugsy Malone
(1976) and more recently The Great Gatsby (2013) all retrospectively
present the 1920s as a time of pleasure and excess. As American cul-
tural products came to dictate the European market in this period, the
American reading of the 1920s has become dominant. But how was
1920s nightlife represented in British cinema? This chapter considers
how British films from the late-silent era depicted that epitome of inter-
war entertainment culture: the nightclub. How did cinema negotiate
the depiction of an American-style leisure space at a time when British
national identity was perceived to be under threat of ‘Americanisation’,
not least because of the dominance of Hollywood films at the box office?
Rather than condemning the nightclub space outright, films showed
both the pleasurable and illicit aspects of the London nightclub. In the
four films analysed in this chapter, this took the form of linking the
nightclub to criminal or illicit behaviour, without this activity actually
taking place in the club space itself. The representation of nightclubs in
1920s British film locates vice in the spaces surrounding the club. This
strategy preserves the club as a space of transgressive, but not illegal,
activity, and thus a space that can be safely enjoyed by cinema audiences.
The Public–Private Nightclub

The jazz-age nightclubs as we think of them today started to appear in
London during World War I (Walkowitz 2012, 215). They were pri-
marily places of entertainment that remained open after the restaurants
and theatres closed, and served soft drinks, alcohol and sometimes food.
Larger clubs also offered floor-shows, performances and even revues.
Nightclubs often challenged the boundaries between legal and illegal
entertainment, by operating without an appropriate licence, or serving
alcohol after permissible hours (Walkowitz 2012, 215–216).
This chapter considers the nightclub as a public–private space: legally
clubs were only supposed to be accessible to members, but nightclubs
frequently did not enforce strict membership rules. This made them offi-
cially private but practically public spaces that nevertheless operated out-
side the purview of the police and policy makers. Nightclub patrons were
able to cross class, gender, sexual and racial boundaries in clubs, not least
because the clubs at the lower end of the market had an open-access pol-
icy. The combination of this boundary crossing and the defiance of legal
GLAMOUR AND CRIME: THE LONDON NIGHTCLUB IN SILENT FILM 29
restrictions meant that the police and press alike saw the need to regulate
both nightclub spaces and the transgressive actions which took place in
them.
The depiction of London nightclubs in British films of the 1920s is
shaped by a set of historically and culturally specific circumstances. These
influence the role of the nightclub setting in the overall film narratives,
and potentially shaped audience notions of London nightlife. Although
films did not shy away from portraying clubs, they were hesitant in locat-
ing them all too specifically in London. The legal restrictions placed on
actual London nightclubs made most of them illegal spaces, which had
to be portrayed negatively. The press helped shape this public opinion,
by often reporting on nightclubs in relation to criminal activity and vice.
The film industry, further restricted by British Board of Film Censors
(BBFC), followed the lead of the press, by portraying nightclubs as
spaces that enabled vice and criminal activity.
In considering a type of space as historically and culturally specific,
I take my lead from film scholar Vivian Sobchack. Sobchack convinc-
ingly argues that the leisure spaces of film noir, such as the cocktail
bar, nightclub and motel, are spatiotemporal manifestations of the his-
torical moment in which the USA found itself in the 1940s and 1950s
(Sobchack 1998, 167). I make the same argument about nightclubs in
1920s London, and, as is demonstrated below, the different historical
features of that space lead to a different depiction of clubs in British films
to those visible in Hollywood productions.
The British films discussed in this chapter—Maisie’s Marriage
(1923), The Pleasure Garden (1925), Piccadilly (1929) and The Wrecker
(1929)—all link the nightclub space with illicit activity, such as prosti-
tution and interracial relationships, but this activity does not take place
within the nightclub itself. Instead, it is located in the offices, apart-
ments, dressing rooms and other spaces that surround the clubs. I argue
that this displacement articulates the necessity for the British film indus-
try to negotiate the audience’s desire for escapism with state-imposed
regulation and censure.
The Development of the London Nightclub

Because nightclubs formed a whole new category of places of enter-
tainment after World War I, the existing legislation had not been writ-
ten with nightclubs in mind. As a consequence, nightclub owners
30 M. Arts
continuously tried to evade and bend these laws, and regularly succeeded
in this. The first Parliamentary Act that attempted to regulate opening
hours of places of public entertainment was passed in 1751. An 1875
Act further restricted opening hours for public houses, but not for
clubs. Club members paid yearly fees and all members owned jointly the
food and drink served by the club. No individual could make a profit
from the club. They were therefore considered a separate type of space
for which less legislation was implemented. Nightclubs exploited this
by positioning themselves as traditional clubs but operating as de facto
public spaces.
Until World War I, there were no restrictions on opening times for
clubs whatsoever. The 1916 Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) and the
1921 Licensing Act restricted opening hours of both clubs and public
houses for the first time, which Judith Walkowitz argues encouraged
the opening of illegal nightclubs (2012, 215). It was no longer a loop-
hole for a space to register as a club. Instead all clubs became subject
to stricter licensing requirements, and all clubs risked prosecution if they
did not adhere to their licensing restrictions.
Joachim Schlör convincingly argues that closing-time restrictions are
an attempt by the authorities to impose day-time control on the night-
time city (Schlör 1998, 99). The very existence of nightclubs was a
challenge to political control. Some clubs accepted the impositions and
applied for licences for music, dancing and the serving of liquor. To
enter these clubs one had to pay a membership fee or be introduced and
signed in by a member. As long as they respected the membership rules
and did not provide alcohol after 11pm, these clubs were wholly legal.
Other clubs, however, did not abide rigorously to these laws, and it is
these clubs that attracted attention from the police and the press.
The restricted nature of opening hours in Britain compared to those
in other countries remained a contested issue throughout the interwar
period. The popularity of illegal nightclubs that stayed open late, or even
all night, indicates that the public view on night-time entertainment dif-
fered starkly from that of policy makers. Cinema tried to negotiate this
difference in views by locating films in nightclub spaces, but ensuring
that films did not present these spaces as entirely pleasurable.
Throughout the 1920s, the Metropolitan Police (the ‘Met’) grappled
with illegal nightclubs in London, and attempted to control them. Its
main challenge was that in order to take action against a club, several
police officers needed to have witnessed illegal activity taking place in it.
Consequently, the Met’s main tactic for policing clubs involved sending
in groups of undercover officers, who had to observe whether any alco-
hol was served after 11pm. The trouble for the police was that in order
to be truly undercover, officers had to participate in the clubs’ activi-
ties as regular customers. It was often necessary to do multiple observa-
tions, in order to collect enough evidence to conduct a raid. This was an
undesirable situation for the police force and often it resulted in a loss of
integrity and bad press (Carter Wood 2012, 77)—even if the evidence of
individual reports suggests that police officers could enjoy their night-
club visits. One of the biggest police scandals of the 1920s was closely
related to the nightclub business. In 1929 Police Sergeant George
Goddard was accused and found guilty of accepting bribes from notori-
ous nightclub owner Mrs. Meyrick. In return for these bribes, Goddard
tipped Meyrick off when police raids were planned on her clubs (Carter
Wood 2012, 78; Shore 2013, 183–202).
Illegal nightclubs thus caused significant damage to the Metropolitan
Police’s reputation in this decade. The notoriety of nightclubs was
encouraged by the way in which they were reported on in the popular
press. Frequent articles about the depravity of the clubs, and the dangers
they were perceived to pose to young women in particular, further estab-
lished the notion that these spaces were outside of state control. The
Daily Express produced a series of sensational articles about nightclubs in
1922, in response to the death of Freda Kempton, a young woman who
had been employed as a professional dancer in one of Mrs. Meyrick’s
nightclubs. Kempton had died of an overdose of cocaine which had
allegedly been supplied to her by a Chinese restaurant owner and crimi-
nal named Brilliant Chang. The incident thus neatly wrapped together
widespread concerns about female mobility, drug use, and non-white
Londoners (Kohn 1992, 123–134).
In the Daily Express series, a ‘Special Representative’ visited nightclubs
to report on their supposed depravity. From 11 to 16 March, 1922,
prominently placed articles by the Special Representative appeared daily
in the newspaper. Nightclubs were described as ‘dens’, which facilitated
‘orgies of drink’ (‘Alarm in the Night Dance Dens’ 1922, 1, 7). They
also reported that the increased media interest in the nightclubs had
caused a ‘panic’ among club owners and patrons who were worried that
they would face increased scrutiny and policing. These fears became a
reality when the Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, started a ‘war’
on nightclubs in 1925 (Shore 2013, 193–194). Joynson-Hicks launched
32 M. Arts
a high-profile campaign, which included stricter legislation and an expan-

sion of police powers in order to crack down on nightclubs.
Throughout the 1920s, the tone in which the police and media
reported on nightclubs was consistently negative. This was in keep-
ing with the illegal nature of the clubs. At the same time, American and
European films showed non-British nightclubs as glamorous spaces of
pleasure and play. This aligned with cinema’s function to provide escapist
fantasies. How then did British cinema negotiate this tension between on
the one hand wanting to provide entertainment, and on the other need-
ing to establish itself as a morally sound and suitably British medium?
The British Nightclub in Silent Film

When thinking of nightclubs in British silent films, the example that
springs most readily to mind is the ‘Piccadilly Club’ in E.A. Dupont’s
1929 film Piccadilly. This film is concerned with the romantic entangle-
ments of nightclub owner Valentine Wilmot (Jameson Thomas) with
both the successful (and white) nightclub performer Mabel (Gilda Gray),
and the Chinese scullery maid Shosho (Anna May Wong). One of the
key themes of Piccadilly is its juxtaposition of the glamorous West End
and the sordid East End. Here I focus on the depiction of the Piccadilly
Club space as one of pleasure, but tinged with danger and violence.
The Club is entered by a large sweeping staircase which leads guests
down to a gleaming dancefloor, which is surrounded by small tables.
Guests wear evening dress, drink champagne and dine on expensive-
looking food. They are all white, and evidently come from privileged
backgrounds. The immaculately dressed waiting staff discreetly attend to
the guests’ every need. From the outset, Piccadilly draws attention to the
public–private nature of the club space. Two women are shown convers-
ing in the women’s cloakroom and they discuss whether the Piccadilly
Club can reasonably qualify as a club: the electric lights on the building’s
façade, which are prominently displayed in the film’s opening sequence,
belie the supposedly private nature of a club (see Fig. 1). As one of the
women enthuses: ‘They call it a club and so everyone wants to come to
it.’ The dialogue acknowledges that the success of the club depends on it
being an ostensibly private but, in reality, openly accessible public space.
The public nature of the club is not threatening as no criminal activity
happens inside it. The expensive and exclusive Piccadilly Club does not
allow any working-class or non-white visitors to enter; this preserves it
Fig. 1 The façade of the Piccadilly Club in Piccadilly (1929)
as a white, middle-class space purely for entertainment and leisure where

there are no threats to the power structures, until the introduction of
Shosho into the narrative. By crossing both class and racial boundaries,
she disrupts the status quo in the nightclub, which leads characters to
conduct illicit and criminal actions, including starting up an inter-
racial relationship. This is not resolved until Shosho’s murder by her
Chinese (ex-)partner at the end of the film. But this murder takes place
in Shosho’s Limehouse apartment, far away from the club itself. The
actions within the club resonate throughout London, but the criminal
activity is contained in the East End and does not affect the nightclub
space, which is reinstated as a site of ‘legitimate’, white, heterosexual
romance.
The film’s ending draws explicit attention to the restoration of ‘nor-
mality’: the film ends with a shot of a newsstand. The newspaper head-
lines report that the Shosho case is solved, but when a man buys a
paper, he ignores these articles and instead looks up whether he has won
34 M. Arts
something in the races. As the camera zooms out, men with advertising
placards attached to them walk by, advertising a new show, ‘Life Goes
On’. With the elimination of the Chinese threat, normal life can indeed
go on in the West End. Valentine’s travel into the Chinese spaces has
ended, and he is back ‘home’ in the crime-free West End.
In other films of the decade, the nightclub is not the primary location
for action, but instead occupies a more marginal place in the narrative.
The action taking place in the nightclub, however, has a big impact on
the narrative’s direction. In the 1923 film Maisie’s Marriage for example,
directed by Alexander Butler and loosely based on Marie Stopes’ famous
study of middle-class sexuality, Married Love, the eponymous pro-
tagonist is lured into a nightclub when she finds herself cast out of her
house and lost in night-time central London. Maisie (Lilian Hall-Davis)
approaches two women to ask for help. She identifies these women as
safe to approach, in contrast to the various men who are also out on the
street. But the women turn out to be shady characters—indeed, they are
implied to be prostitutes. Under the guise of keeping her safe, they lead
Maisie into a nightclub and pay her entrance fee for her.
Because the women appear to know the nightclub owner, it is no
problem for Maisie to enter the club. Again, the club is readily acces-
sible by anyone. The film describes the space in an intertitle as ‘A mys-
tic underworld behind closed doors, where Bacchus and Aphrodite
fox-trot.’ This links the club to negative aspects of secrecy, eroticism
and excess. These are further underlined by the appearance of the club’s
entrance, which is an anonymous doorway, and the presence of an all-
black band, which presumably plays jazz. Once inside the club, which
is again full of people in evening dress sitting at small tables drinking
champagne, Maisie is led to a table where a male customer is already sit-
ting. Through the course of their conversation it becomes clear that the
customer thinks Maisie is a prostitute. When she rebuffs his advances,
he realises his mistake and shields her from the nightclub owner’s angry
threats that she is causing trouble. After this incident, Maisie is so dis-
tressed that she decides to commit suicide by throwing herself into
the Thames. She is saved by a middle-class couple who see her jump.
As suicide remained a criminal act until 1961, Maisie is led in front of
a magistrate’s court. The magistrate sends her to the workhouse for her
suicide attempt, but also remarks that she had been seen to be going into
a nightclub. Again, the actions within the nightclub lead characters to
commit criminal acts, which have a significant impact on their lives.
Although the nightclub in Maisie’s Marriage is shown as a space

that facilitates prostitution, the film does not actually show any prosti-
tution taking place, in part because film censorship rules did not allow
it. Instead, the male customer becomes a chivalric hero, rather than a
‘john’, when he protects Maisie from the violent club owner. In this, the
customer demonstrates British gentlemanly values. He rejects the illegal
activities in the club and prevents them from taking place. But the effect
on Maisie is so great that it leads her to commit a self-destructive act,
which was considered criminal at the time.
In Hitchcock’s directorial debut The Pleasure Garden, made during
his time in Germany in 1925, chorus girls Jill (Carmelita Geraghty) and
Patsy (Virginia Valli) visit a nightclub after one of their shows. They are
accompanied by Jill’s fiancé Hugh (John Stuart) and his friend Levett
(Miles Mander). Hugh is about to be posted overseas for his job, and
he is concerned about leaving Jill behind in the ‘pleasure garden’ of the
London theatre scene. His worries prove to be justified. Although at the
start of the film Jill seems to be virtuous, her self-control is tested in the
nightclub. Here, too, the club is patronised by well-to-do Londoners in
expensive clothing, and the foursome raise a toast to Jill with modern
cocktails. In the background couples dance in front of grand windows.
In the club, the wealthy Prince Ivan comes up to Jill to express his
admiration of her (Fig. 2). Jill is so taken by this that as soon as Hugh
leaves the country, she allows Prince Ivan to support her financially in
return for her affections. While Prince Ivan can admire Jill from afar in
the theatre, the nightclub is the space that allows him the freedom to
introduce himself to her in person, right under her fiancé’s nose. But
Jill’s interaction with the Prince is innocent in the nightclub itself, and
we do not see them visit another club in the film. The nightclub enables
their relationship, but the actual sexual transgression takes place else-
where and off-screen.
The Pleasure Garden presents the nightclub as the obvious space to
visit after a theatre show. Nightclubs were indeed popular venues for
chorus girls and other theatre folk, as shows ended around 11pm, which
was also the legal time prescribed for last orders. Illegal venues were
therefore the only places actors could have access to alcohol after even-
ing performances (‘Liquor: Irregularities in Theatre’ 1909; Walkowitz
2012, 220). Patsy apparently has no qualms about visiting the club, even
though she is otherwise presented as a responsible character. She also
tells Hugh that she will make sure ‘these stage-door tomcats’ stay away
36 M. Arts
Fig. 2 Prince Ivan introduces himself to Jill in The Pleasure Garden (1925)
from Jill, readily accepting the nightclub as the natural habitat of these
admirers. The nightclub is thus embedded in London’s nightlife, but the
theatre world is also tainted by its close association with the club, which
allows lascivious behaviour to take place. Levett condones Jill’s flirtatious
behaviour towards Prince Ivan, seeing it as assertiveness on her part and
calling Hugh ‘dewy-eyed’. The nightclub complicates judgements about
‘right’ or ‘wrong’ ways to act, mirroring the British film industry’s con-
flicted stance towards them.
The club gives Jill the freedom to further her career and improve her
position, but also undermines assumptions about monogamous hetero-
sexual relationships. Women increasingly participated in the workforce
during World War I and they retained a degree of this independence in
the interwar period. This development was what allowed women to pat-
ronise nightclubs in the first place. Women’s emancipation and changing
gender roles, epitomised in the caricature of the ‘flapper’, became linked
to a perceived increase in liberal sexual behaviour which raised anxieties
about the breakdown of the Victorian family ideal (Bingham 2009,

99–102). The Pleasure Garden presents the nightclub as the key space of
modernity that corrupts the institution of marriage.
At the end of the silent period, a nightclub briefly appears in the 1929
drama The Wrecker, directed by Géza von Bolváry. Its appearance here
demonstrates the changing attitudes towards clubs throughout the dec-
ade. The film is concerned with Roger ‘Lucky’ Doyle (Joseph Striker)
and his girlfriend Mary (Benita Hume). The couple attempts to find out
the identity of a mysterious train-wrecker, who is active on the London
railways. Halfway through the film there is a scene set in a nightclub,
in which the man the audience knows to be the ‘Wrecker’ (Carlyle
Blackwell) and his female accomplice Beryl (Pauline Johnson) try to
get Roger off the Wrecker’s trail. The nightclub scene is announced by
a close-up shot of a letter that reads: ‘If “Lucky” Doyle wants to keep
his luck and find the Wrecker, let him be at the Manhattan club tonight
at 9pm–alone. A table has been reserved in his name.’ The nightclub is
introduced as a space where secretive meetings take place and sensitive
information is shared: the film presents this anonymous letter as a com-
pletely normal occurrence and Roger accepts it without question.
The Wrecker does not provide the audience with any location for the
club. The name of the club, the Manhattan, is equally non-specific. It
invokes visions of New York nightlife, rather than situating the club pre-
cisely in London. The rest of the film does draw attention to its London
setting, though. For example, it frequently shows the audience a map of
the London rail network. Because the Manhattan club is not explicitly
located in London, the actions which take place inside it are not coded
as typically British. The explicitly British character of the rest of the film
is put aside for this scene, with the result that the action in the nightclub
scene is separated from the British national character.
As Roger enters the club, the camera shows Beryl and the Wrecker
seated at a table on the balcony. When Roger is seated the Wrecker tells
Beryl she should go to him, make his acquaintance and then take him
to her flat to keep him there. From Beryl’s response (‘Very well … but
it’s the last time’) it can be concluded that she has played the role of
escort several times before. As the scene develops, however, Beryl instead
chooses to warn Roger and leave the club on her own, after which the
Wrecker tells Roger to board a certain train that the Wrecker knows is
going to be derailed. If this was the villain’s intention all along, there is
no reason for Beryl to have to take Roger back to her flat. The result of
38 M. Arts
this allusion to prostitution establishes the nightclub space as a space that

enables criminal and transgressive activity.
Because no other reference to prostitution is made in the film, the
narrative establishes a connection between sexual transgression and the
nightclub in the same way as Maisie’s Marriage. But unlike Maisie, Beryl
does not feel shame for being in a nightclub. Instead the film presents
her as somewhat of a heroine, and does not condemn her for being pre-
sent in the club. Again, this is a reflection of the increasing legitimisa-
tion of nightclubs. The club space solidifies the criminal character of the
Wrecker, and this is reinforced by the fact that Roger gets told in the
club to board the ill-fated train. The implication is that a conversation
held in the nightclub could potentially lead to death. Yet again, however,
no criminal activity takes place in the club itself.
Changing Attitudes Towards the Nightclub

As the analysis of nightclub scenes in these four silent films shows, British
films were unable to present clubs as uncomplicated pleasurable spaces.
British films, in their effort to compete with American imports, could
not avoid showing clubs, as they were a staple of escapist nightlife land-
scapes in Hollywood films and entertained the audience, so they were
seen as necessary to draw in spectators. But at the same time, British
filmmakers had to be mindful of legal restrictions, and were operating
at a time when there were concerns about the corrupting influence of
American cinema. British films positioned themselves in relation to
those fears, as an acceptable alternative. As a result, a compromise was
reached by showing clubs, but making sure they were negatively linked
with crime and transgression. Nightclubs were also made to look as
‘un-British’ as possible by giving cinematic clubs cosmopolitan names
and refusing to locate them all too specifically within the capital.
Throughout the decade, nightclubs became more acceptable to the
public even if the police and Home Office still attempted to close them.
This public acceptance developed in part because high-profile celeb-
rities such as popular actor and songwriter Ivor Novello opened clubs
(Williams and Napper 2001, 42–67). By the beginning of the sound era
they had become legitimised places of entertainment. This is reflected
in the development of their cinematic representation: the club goes
from decidedly shady in Maisie’s Marriage, to exclusive to certain mor-
ally dubious groups such as actors in The Pleasure Garden, to widely
patronised by the upper classes, but still tinged with illicit activity, in
Piccadilly and The Wrecker.
The press, too, changed its tone about clubs when newspapers
started to recognise that clubs could bring in advertising revenue. The
Kit-Cat Club, opened in 1925, is an early example of a nightclub that
openly advertised itself. On October 19, 1928, it even bought up the
entire front page of the Daily Mail for promotion. Outside of advertis-
ing, newspapers also legitimised clubs by describing them in their gossip
columns and news articles as exciting places, attendance of which could
raise one’s social profile. In the next decade, films such as the Jessie
Matthew vehicle It’s Love Again (1936) and George Formby’s Trouble
Brewing (1939) showed clubs as fun spaces, uncomplicated by criminal
links. The culturally specific world of the 1920s British nightclub had
disappeared, but surviving films provide a reminder of the challenges this
space posed to filmmakers at the time.
References
Alarm in the Night Dance Dens. Daily Express, March 13, 1922, 1, 7.
Bingham, Adrian. 2009. Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life, and the British
Popular Press 1918–1978. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Carter Wood, John. 2012. Press, Politics, and the Police and Public Debates in
Late 1920s Britain. Crime, Histoire & Sociétés 16 (1): 75–98.
Fitzgerald, F.Scott. 2012. The Beautiful and Damned. London: Alma Classics.
Kohn, Marek. 1992. Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground.
London: Lawrence & Wiseheart.
Liquor: Irregularities in Theatre. 1909. The National Archives (TNA), MEPO
3/195.
Morton, H.V. 1931. The Nights of London. London: Methuen.
Schlör, Joachim. 1998. Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London, 1840–1930.
London: Reaktion.
Shore, Heather. 2013. ‘Constable Dances with Instructress’: The Police and the
Queen of Nightclubs in Inter-war London. Social History 38 (2): 183–202.
Sobchack, Vivian. 1998. Lounge Time: Postwar Crises and the Chronotope of
Film Noir. In Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History, ed. Nick
Browne, 129–170. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Walkowitz, Judith. 2012. Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London. London: Yale
University Press.
Williams, Michael, and Lawrence Napper. 2001. The Curious Appeal of Ivor
Novello. In British Stars and Stardom: From Alma Taylor to Sean Connery, ed.
Bruce Babington, 42–67. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936): Conspirators
and Bombs in Actual, Literary
and Filmic London
Pam Hirsch
‘Just about five on Thursday a loud explosion occurred in Greenwich

Park, with what results we all know. It is but right to look upon the pre-
mature explosion of the infernal machine as the act of Providence.’ This
is the opening sentence under an article in the Illustrated Police Budget
entitled ‘Victim of His Own Diabolical Device’ (February 24, 1894; see
Fig. 1). The event that came to be known as the Greenwich bomb out-
rage occurred on February 5, 1894. A twenty-six-year-old French anar-
chist named Martial Bourdin died, according to his death certificate,
from ‘shock and haemorrhage from explosion of bomb whilst feloni-
ously handling it in Greenwich Park.’1 The press was full of this event
for weeks. Found on Bourdin’s body was a membership card for an anar-
chist club, and recipes for the preparation of explosives copied from a
book located in the British Museum. It seems likely that Martial’s older
brother, Henri, might have constructed the bomb, as there was some
indication in the press to the effect that Martial was weak-minded.2
P. Hirsch (*) 
e-mail: ph211@cam.ac.uk

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64979-5_4
42 P. Hirsch
Fig. 1 Blown up by his own bomb (Illustrated Police Budget, February

24, 1894, reproduced with kind permission of The British Library).
HITCHCOCK’S SABOTAGE (1936): CONSPIRATORS AND BOMBS IN … 43
Inspired by this real-life event, in February 1906 Joseph Conrad

began a short story called ‘Verloc’ which he then developed into The
Secret Agent, the only one of his novels to be set almost entirely in
London. Adolf Verloc is employed by a foreign (Russian) embassy, which
pays him to report on the activities of anarchist groups with names like
the International Red Committee and the Future of the Proletariat. The
novel opens with Verloc being summoned to the Embassy and ordered
to bomb the Greenwich Royal Observatory, with the motive of shock-
ing the British government into adopting a tougher line against anar-
chists. Verloc is also an unpaid informer to the British police, so is a
double secret agent. His wife, Winnie, has married him only in order
to secure a place of safety for her simple-minded brother, Stevie, so she,
too, could be regarded as a kind of secret agent in the interests of her
brother. Stevie stumbles and the bomb goes off prematurely; this aspect
of the novel seems in line with press accounts of the hapless bomber in
the Greenwich outrage. When Winnie discovers what has happened to
her brother, she stabs her husband to death, and, after initially starting
to make a getaway to France, drowns herself in the Channel. Thus, the
bomber in Conrad’s novel has moved from one, albeit somewhat weak
minded, directly involved in an anarchist movement, to an entirely inno-
cent scapegoat. The third iteration of this narrative—in Hitchcock’s
Sabotage (1936)—retains the innocent bomb-carrier, although he does
not feel any dramatic purpose is served by representing him as simple
minded; rather he has made him a typical careless schoolboy.
Although the majority of criticism of Hitchcock’s films have tended
towards quasi-psychoanalytical critiques both of the films and also of the
man, this chapter points in a different direction. It concerns itself more
with placing the film in a historical and political context. In so far as it
refers to Hitchcock the man, it is specifically in terms of his relationship
with and to London. In 1927 Hitchcock had wanted to make an experi-
mental film symphony, simply called ‘London’, but he was under con-
tract to make four BIP (British International Pictures) productions every
year, so could not find the time (or money) to turn his ideas into a film.
However, I will argue that Hitchcock’s love of London is amply played
out in his film, Sabotage (1936), at a time when it was beginning to
come under threat: we see loving depictions of Londoners going about
their working lives, be they greengrocers, bus-drivers, or market traders,
or the audience laughing at a film in their local cinema.
44 P. Hirsch
Hitchcock in the 1930s

Sabotage was made in a wholly different era from Conrad’s novel, an era
when the perceived threat to the country was from Germany, rather than
from Russian anarchists. Therefore, in the film it is indicated, rather than
stated, that the saboteurs were German. As distinct from the atmosphere
of Conrad’s novel, in which fog—as in Dickens’ Bleak House—is almost
a character, emblematising the murky moral world of spies and counter-
spies, in Sabotage the spectator can clearly see what is going on. The
principal location is not a seedy shop (as in the novel), but a cinema, so a
theme of seeing (though also sometimes not seeing) is established imme-
diately. As Donald Spoto comments, ‘the ironic and metaphorical use of
the cinema is brilliantly conceived in Sabotage’, working as ‘a correlative
for deadly illusion’ (1999, 156). Verloc, albeit with some reluctance, is
not the protective husband and father-figure to Stevie that he presents
himself as, but rather a man persuaded to bomb innocent people.
Although Hitchcock always claimed to be non-political, he was una-
bashedly patriotic. Nevertheless, it would be hard to avoid acknowledg-
ing that the five films he made in the period following Hitler becoming
Chancellor of Germany in 1933 and Britain’s entry into World War
II—The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), Secret
Agent (1936), Sabotage and The Lady Vanishes (1938)—could be
regarded as ‘political’, dealing as they did with various shadowy conspira-
cies. Mark Glancy, for example, in his guide to The 39 Steps, comments
that ‘although the words “Germany” and “Hitler” are never spoken, the
atmosphere of the film actually conveys much more than any specific ref-
erences as to who, what and why’ (2003, 19). His comment applies simi-
larly to Sabotage, where the conspirators suggest the presence in London
of the Nazi’s Fifth Column.
Despite the fact that, in this period before Britain’s entry into World
War II, fascist Germany was clearly a threat to world peace, the British
Board of Film Censors (BBFC) frowned upon politics in film, and so, in
effect, supported, or at least did not challenge, the policy of appeasement.
Lord Tyrrel, in 1936 President of the Board, told exhibitors that ‘nothing
would be more calculated to arouse the passion of the British public than
the introduction on the screen of subjects dealing with religious or politi-
cal controversy’ (quoted in Richards and Robertson 2009 70). Hitchcock,
having joined Gaumont-British studios in 1934, was there afforded by
Michael Balcon a free hand to choose his material. Although Balcon,
writing later in his autobiography, would comment that ‘often, looking

back, I am gravely concerned that the films which I produced at certain
points of history reflected so little the society in which we lived’, practis-
ing the art of the possible might be the best way to summarise the poli-
tics of the films directed by Hitchcock in the 1930s (1969, 25). As Tom
Ryall comments in relation to British films of the 1930s, ‘it can be argued
that the spy thriller genre is an indication of the growing consciousness of
the political turbulence in Europe, the rise of Fascism and the troubled
international situation which was to erupt into the Second World War’
(1996, 138). In order to subvert the BBFC’s prohibitions, Hitchcock’s
‘political’ films avoided saying directly to which nation the enemy agents
belonged; it was deliberately left somewhat opaque. Although by 1938,
in The Lady Vanishes, the uniforms of the villains make it pretty clear that
they are Gestapo, nevertheless they are still not named as such. And, as
Ryall points out with specific reference to Sabotage, ‘the middle European
accents of … Verloc and his spymaster … provide a distinctive aural token
of the European menace from the British point of view’ (1996, 138).
It is also significant that Ivor Montagu, a left-wing Associate Producer
at Gaumont-British, was keen to promote political stories and worked
as a producer on five of Hitchcock’s 1930s’ British films.3 The style of
Hitchcock’s shooting was distinct from straightforward realism and ‘he
would always refer, in articles and interviews, to the impact made on
him by Soviet montage editing’ (Barr 2009, 151). Eisenstein’s methods
had been first brought to his attention by Montagu, one of the founder
members of the Film Society of London, started in 1925, an important
centre for studying European and Russian films. Montagu was a commit-
ted communist, twice visiting the young Soviet Union in the 1920s and
in 1929 travelling with Eisenstein to Hollywood. Montagu’s invitation to
Eisenstein to address the Film Society was acknowledged by Hitchcock as
a significant influence on his own ideas of film-making (Sargeant 2005,
84). Hitchcock’s editing techniques in Sabotage are implicated in his
desire to shock the audience into a (political) state of consciousness.
However, notwithstanding his attachment to the techniques of
European cinema, it is also the case, to quote Charles Barr, that ‘no-one
could be more obviously, tenaciously English than Hitchcock’ (Barr 2009,
131). Or, as Durgnat puts it, ‘to forget that Hitchcock is a quasi-cockney is
like forgetting that Losey is American or Fritz Lang German’ (1974, 136).
And, finally, as Dan Auiler comments, ‘to begin to understand Hitchcock
you have to stand on the streets of Leytonstone, London, where he came
46 P. Hirsch
from’ (1999, 2). Alfred Hitchcock, the son of an East End greengrocer,
born in the final year of the nineteenth century, grew up in a London that
was still to some extent the London of Dickens.4 He claimed that from the
age of six or seven he had travelled alone all over London: ‘he became fas-
cinated … by the London omnibus system, collected maps and timetables,
and eventually realized his ambition of travelling every yard of the London
General Omnibus Company’s routes’ (Russell Taylor 1996, 30–31).
During World War I, like everyone else in London, Hitchcock expe-
rienced Zeppelin raids, and from as early as summer of 1914, the news-
papers were full of rumours of enemy submarines roaming the Irish Sea
and allegations that Germans were planning sabotage in London. As one
of his biographers comments: ‘living through wartime in his formative
years deeply influenced a body of work that is filled with crazed assassins
and spy plots, bombs that destroy innocents, and villains with German
accents’ (McGilligan 2003, 25).
Hitchcock moved to Hollywood in 1939, to honour a contract signed
with David O. Selznick in July 1938. This has led to some of his fellow
countrymen regarding him as unpatriotic, notwithstanding his return to
London to make two propaganda films for the Ministry of Information
later in the war. But Hitchcock is a filmmaker with a significant oeuvre of
films which celebrate London life, and of all Hitchcock’s films, Sabotage
is the one in which cinema and life on the London streets continually
echo one another. The Londoners on the Underground, in the street
markets, or sharing their enjoyment of watching a film in the cinema,
represent a form of social cohesion, which comes under threat.
The Film: London Under Threat

The film begins with a close-up of a dictionary page defining sabotage
as the ‘wilful destruction of buildings or machinery with the object of
alarming a group of persons or causing public uneasiness’. Detective
Ted Spencer (John Loder), when consulting his superior officer about
the purpose of sabotage, is told that the point is ‘making trouble at
home to take our minds off what’s going on abroad’, so the politi-
cal ramifications of the film are laid out from the opening shots. There
follows a close-up of a bulb flickering and then all London goes dark.
Another shot shows the discovery that sand put into a key component of
London’s electricity grid must have been the result of an act of sabotage.
Nevertheless, London commuters emerging from the underground seem
unalarmed and remarkably cheerful as they find their way out by holding
up matches and cigarette lighters. The scene-by-scene treatment of the
film held by the British Film Institute says specifically:
In the dim lights dozens of matches are struck and the effect is like a pro-
cession of miniature torches. As the first of the people near the camera, we
see that, far from being perturbed by the mishap, they are greatly amused
and we hear the laughter and genial murmuring of the typical London
crowd. (Sabotage: Full Treatment May 14 1936)
Carl Verloc (Oscar Homolka) is the owner of the Bijou cinema in

Camberwell (although we learn during the film that his sinister paymas-
ters have financed it); it acts as his front, from where he can use a con-
venient side entrance to his living quarters when he wants to slip in and
out unnoticed. On the day of the blackout, he makes use of this to pre-
tend he has never been out; the audience sees Verloc come into their
flat, and proceed to wash from his hands traces of sand. Loosening his
tie, and covering his face with a newspaper, he is discovered, apparently
asleep, by his wife (Sylvia Sidney). She has come to tell him that there is
a fuss at the cinema ticket office, with customers asking for their money
back. Verloc assures her that she can reimburse the disappointed custom-
ers as he has ‘some money coming in’. Although surprised, Mrs. Verloc
goes back down to the ticket booth at the front of the cinema to tell the
customers the good news, just as the lights come back on; power has
been restored and the film can be shown.
Even though Verloc seems at times a somewhat reluctant conspira-
tor, urged on by bullying compatriots, the film nevertheless strongly
suggests that a Nazi Fifth Column is operating in Britain. However, the
laughter of the Londoners is in direct contrast to the depiction of the
sinister group of conspirators. After the act of sabotage that has caused
the blackout in London, Verloc’s handler, Vladimir (Austin Trevor), is
furious that the intention of spreading unease has clearly failed and that
Londoners have proved to be too robust to panic. The headlines in all
the newspaper are variants of ‘London laughs at the blackout’. And this
laughter is one of the defining features of English resistance to threat. As
Peter Lee points out:
48 P. Hirsch
Vladimir and his cohorts lack a sense of humour. Hitchcock distinguishes

these foreign heavies from everyday Englishmen through the unemotional
detachment… [Vladimir comments] ‘When one sets out to put the fear of
death into people, it does not help to make them laugh. We’re not come-
dians.’ (2014, 69)
And Lee goes on to emphasise Vladimir’s motives for wanting to bomb

the underground station at Piccadilly. Vladimir explains to Verloc that:
‘I once read a sign in Piccadilly Circus calling it the center [sic] of the
world.’ From a calculated perspective, chaos at the heart of London would
surely affect all levels of the English body politic. (Lee 2014, 69)
This, indeed, is a thought that has struck more recent bombers of

London’s transport systems. Charlotte Brunsdon has pointed out that
the London Underground is the oldest of the world’s subway systems
and that there is in film a long history of travellers in the underground
serving as an indication of cross-social-class Londoners (2007, 133).
And, although Sabotage is pre-World War II, viewers today inevitably
think of plucky Londoners during the Blitz making the best of the situa-
tion by sheltering in the underground.
Spying on the conspirators is Ted Spencer, working undercover as
a greengrocer’s assistant in the shop next to the cinema, but early on
revealed to the spectator as a detective sergeant working for London’s
Scotland Yard. The greengrocer’s stall is on the one hand a convenient
vantage point from which Ted spies on Verloc and the men who visit
him, but on the other hand, his regular appearance with apples and
fresh lettuce also seems to imbue him with a kind of English whole-
someness. Small details accrue to reinforce this idea. On one occasion,
when following Mrs. Verloc as part of his job, he pretends to bump into
her and Stevie by chance in Trafalgar Square; in the background of the
shot we see the plinth of Nelson’s Column, commemorating the great-
est naval hero in British history and one of the most famous landmarks
in London. This shot is followed by Ted’s offer to treat them to lunch,
which, with his policeman’s hat on (so to speak), is intended to offer
an opportunity to pump Mrs. Verloc about her husband’s activities. Ted
takes them to Simpsons in the Strand, one of London’s oldest and most
traditional restaurants (and Hitchcock’s favourite), famous for its roast
beef (Fig. 2). When Winnie, thinking of the expense, urges her young
Fig. 2 Roast beef at Simpson’s, in Sabotage (1936) (image courtesy of Kobak/

Shutterstock).
brother to ask for a cheap repast, Ted exclaims in mock horror, ‘Poached
egg! At Simpson’s – the shrine of roast beef!’ The waiter bringing their
meal clearly recognises Ted as a regular there, which further establishes
him as standing for a certain kind of English decency. And a final detail,
establishing Ted as a quintessentially honest man, is that, realising that he
is falling in love with Mrs. Verloc, he pays for the lunch out of his own
pocket, tearing up the police reimbursement slip (Yacowar 2010, 172).
In a scene shot in the aquarium of Regent’s Park Zoo, Vladimir
makes it clear to Verloc that he will receive no money until he delivers
a primed bomb to Piccadilly Circus. After the meeting, Verloc stares at
the large glass side of a fish tank, which transmutes into a screen show-
ing the people and the traffic of Piccadilly Circus dissolving in the wake
of the explosion. This fantasy scene is the only one in the film in which
we see the ‘results’ of a bomb going off in central London. Verloc has
50 P. Hirsch
been tipped off by a fellow conspirator that Ted is a detective spying on

him, so he fatally exploits his wife’s young brother, Stevie, as the inno-
cent carrier of the time-bomb (made by ‘The Professor’), which he is
instructed to leave in the cloakroom at Piccadilly Circus. Stevie happily
pursues his errand of delivering a can of film (the overt purpose of the
errand) and the parcel concealing the bomb, primed to go off at one
forty-five. The suspense for the audience is ramped up by the endless
delays to Stevie’s commission. The Full Treatment, realised in the film
by a significant scene in an East End street market, is more than just a
delaying device. Thematically, it echoes the earlier scenes of Londoners
laughing at the blackout. In both scenes the camera’s affectionate gaze
and its attention both to the detail of everyday life and the bonhomie of
ordinary good-natured Londoners fleshes out the London of the film.
The Full Treatment indicates:
We come to a Close Up of the parcel under Stevie’s arm. As he moves

away from the camera we see him moving down a typical London mar-
ket street… We see him fascinated by the various side-shows which are so
much a part of the street – the brass weighing scales – the barking puppy
stall – the homemade sweet maker – the street conjuror – the ice-cream
man cutting up slabs of ice – the spectacle stall with people trying on a
pair of glasses etc. – all of which make him pause a little. Until finally he
is attracted by a man who sells toothpaste. An empty chair on a small ros-
trum is by his stand. The man is bellowing the praises of his toothpaste,
brilliantine etc. He offers a demonstration. Espying Stevie he beckons him
to the chair… Ultimately he leaves the street with a Valentino-like head –
sleek and shining. (Sabotage: Full Treatment 14 May, 1936)
Stevie, thus anointed (Fig. 3), having been delayed by the street markets,
at last comes to a spot by St Clement Danes, and stopped by the crowds,
pauses to watch the Lord Mayor’s Show, the annual procession to the
Law Courts for the Lord Mayor’s oath of office. The Life Guards on
horseback, the accompanying band, even Big Ben in the background, all
form pageantry that specifically emblematises London, but also Britain
and its empire. The parade and crowds assembled slow Stevie’s progress
to the extent that he jumps on a bus in Lower Regent Street, but it is
soon mired in traffic, and the bus only crawls towards Piccadilly Circus.5
The good-natured conductor has let him on the bus, despite the fact
that it is forbidden to take films on public transport because celluloid
is highly flammable. Clutching his fatal parcel, Stevie sits down on the
bus next to a woman holding a puppy; the shots of the boy playing with
Fig. 3 Stevie, already a victim, in Sabotage (1936) (image courtesy of Rex/

Shutterstock).
52 P. Hirsch
the puppy doubly points up innocence. The focus on the puppy also
indicates a peculiarly English attribute, a sentimental fondness for pets,
especially dogs. As a further proof of the English concern for animals,
the censor made only two absolute objections to the first submitted
treatment of Sabotage. The first concerned a scene where the domesti-
cally incompetent Stevie, attempting to deal with the dinner when the
‘daily’, Mrs. Jones, had left work early, accidentally dripped hot fat from
the roasting tin onto ‘the unfortunate tabby’. The censor demanded that
they delete this scene as it portrayed cruelty to a cat. He also asked for
the deletion of a scene where babies were being given Guinness outside
a public house, and asked whether it was necessary for Ted to put his
love before his duty as a policeman. But there was no concern expressed
about the blowing up of a whole busload of innocent people (Sabotage
Scenario 15 June, 1936).
In the film, retribution follows when Mrs. Verloc, on realising that
her husband is directly responsible for the death of her brother, stabs
him with the carving knife. Or, perhaps, more accurately, Verloc, recog-
nising what she may be contemplating, tries to snatch it from her and
he is stabbed; he almost becomes stabbed. There is an echo here of the
stabbing scene in an earlier film by Hitchcock, Blackmail, in which the
tormented heroine stabs the man who attempts to rape her. Blackmail,
similarly, was praised for its depiction of ‘an everyday London world’
in contrast to Hollywood versions of London (Glancy 2007, 193). But
more significantly perhaps, in Sabotage the audience is made aware of
what is under threat and what is at stake, because—not withstanding ele-
ments of melodrama—there is such careful representation of ordinary,
everyday London life. The greengrocer’s stall, the street markets, and the
local cinemas offer social class markers, which are ‘detailed and authen-
tic’ (Ryall 1996, 154). And notwithstanding Hitchcock’s significant and
highly praised examples of montage editing in Sabotage, which endless
critics have examined, at least as important in this film is a realised sense
of London as a city.
Conclusion
So, overall, what is gained in Hitchcock’s depiction of decent Londoners
at work and at play contrasted with sinister (German) conspirators?
My argument is that Hitchcock utilised the spy story format to depict
London and Londoners to create a heightened sense in the audience of
what might be under threat. Durgnat (1974) argues that The 39 Steps,
released in 1935, offers a warning against a sort of national myopia
about the state of affairs in Germany and the fascists at home. If we refer
his argument to Sabotage, made a year later, should we then consider
Mrs. Verloc as a prime example of a citizen who cannot see what is in
front of her nose? Only when her brother Stevie is killed does she wake
up to the fact that her husband is engaged in sabotage. Ted, on the other
hand, might be considered to represent a more alert and watchful aspect
of the state. And the state is considered an essentially decent one because
this policeman chooses to eat at a specific London restaurant (and does
not charge his employers for the meal with a woman on whom he is spy-
ing, but has come to love).
Truffaut, notwithstanding his classic book of early 1960s interviews
with Hitchcock seeking to reposition him as an auteur rather than a pro-
vider of light entertainment, confessed that he had found the film ‘rather
disappointing’ (1984, 108).6 At the time of its first screening, the film
certainly met with mixed reviews: New York Times critic Frank S. Nugent
praised the film as a ‘masterly exercise in suspense’, in which Hitchcock
‘builds ruthlessly to his climaxes and makes their impact sharp and sud-
den’ (quoted in O’Brien 2016, 154). On the other hand, an influen-
tial London critic, C.A. Lejeune, in her review for the Sunday Observer,
objected to the death of the innocent boy, and Hitchcock himself later
concurred with this view, admitting to Truffaut that the death of Stevie
was ‘a serious mistake’ (Truffaut 1984, 109). However, the film was in
this regard—though not in many others—faithful to the Conrad novel,
which had itself drawn inspiration from the Greenwich bomb outrage.
But, in any case, the death of the innocent Stevie, not so much a London
everyman, but an every-schoolboy, was arguably ‘necessitated by the pre-
dominant theme of the spread of chaos and the awful suffering of the
innocent through the action of revolutionaries and terrorists’ (Spoto
1999, 157–158).
Susan Smith has made a compelling case for Hitchcock himself
sabotaging an audience’s ability to watch this film complacently. She
concludes:
Looking back over the film as a whole, it is possible to see how, although
the male characters eventually fall victim to their own violent acts of sabo-
tage (the Professor’s act of blowing up the Bijou cinema, along with him-
self and his already dead colleague, fulfilling a self-destructive potential
54 P. Hirsch
that was inherent in their dealings with sabotage all along), the film’s
more sophisticated strategies of suspense and humour ultimately serve to
imply that Hitchcock remains in control of his self-inscription as saboteur.
(2000, 14)
Indeed, arguably there is a case for suggesting, notwithstanding the

increasing suspense during Stevie’s protracted and interrupted jour-
ney, whilst the clock inexorably ticks on, that Hitchcock sabotages a
cinema audience’s (genre) expectation that an innocent boy would or
should be rescued at the last minute. As Truffaut protested, ‘making a
child die in a film is a rather ticklish matter; it comes close to an abuse
of power’ (1984, 109). Whatever recanting Hitchcock was to do later,
both to Truffaut and to other interviewers, at the time that he made the
film, his directorial decision was that the boy should be blown up. This
is not merely a matter of following Conrad’s template, because adapta-
tions—and Sabotage is no exception—poach what they want from an
original event or text, but also change what they want. As his screen-
writer Charles Bennett confirmed, ‘Hitch and I planned a sequence in
which the bomb was to detonate at a given minute, even second, right
in the heart of Piccadilly Circus. This suspense built up beautifully,
playing against the time limit of the bomb ticking away towards explo-
sion’ (2014, 66). In Sabotage a child, a puppy, and a busload of people
destroyed by an act of terror in the centre of London symbolise a threat
to a whole way of life. And in 1936 this was politically significant.
Notes
1. I am grateful to Dr. Robert Henderson for sending me a copy of the death
certificate of Martial Bourdin; he also pointed out to me that the phrase
‘felo de se’ on the death certificate indicates that Bourdin had taken his
own life, and so this man could be regarded as an early example of a sui-
cide bomber.
2. Dr. Henderson’s research has revealed that a pass to the Reading Room
of the British Museum had been issued to Henri Bourdin and not to his
brother, Martial, So, either Martial borrowed the ticket, or Henri was fully
complicit, and indeed the leader of this particular enterprise (Henderson
2008, 158, note 103).
3. Ivor Montagu, 1904–1984, film-maker, film critic and communist. In
1937 Montagu went to Spain to make documentary films in support of
the Republicans during the Civil War. He worked for the Ministry of
Information during World War II. According to Ben Macintyre (2010, 87)
Ivor Montagu was ‘Agent Intelligentsia’ for the Soviet GRU before and
during World War II. Montagu’s handler was Colonel Sklyarov, the soviet
air attaché in London. Montagu was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize by the
Soviet Union in 1959.
4. Hitchcock is honoured with a blue plaque at 517, Leytonstone High
Road, E11.
5. Gary Giblin, in the section ‘Stevie’s Final Journey’, points out that ‘an
accurate reproduction of a journey from SW5 to W1 was not a primary
concern of Hitchcock’s … it was another case of getting shots where one
could and hoping the audience wouldn’t notice the decidedly idiosyn-
cratic route taken by the ill-fated boy’ (2006, 149). The shot of Blackfriars
Bridge, to give just one example, shows Stevie heading south, which
would have taken him away, not towards, central London.
6. Note, however, that the recent film directed by Kent Jones, Hitchcock/
Truffaut, released in March 2016, affords significant attention to the mon-
tage editing of Sabotage. See also the review of this documentary by Miller
(2016).
References
Auiler, Dan. 1999. Hitchcock’s Secret Notebooks. London: Bloomsbury.
Balcon, Michael. 1969. Michael Balcon Presents…A Lifetime of Films. London:
Hutchinson.
Barr, Charles. 2009. Before Blackmail: Silent British Cinema. In The British
Cinema Book, 3rd ed, ed. Robert Murphy, 145–154. London: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Bennett, John Charles. 2014. Hitchcock’s Partner in Suspense: The Life of
Screenwriter Charles Bennett. Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky.
Brunsdon, Charlotte. 2007. London in Cinema: The Cinematic City Since 1945.
Durgnat, Raymond. 1974. The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock. London: Faber
& Faber.
Giblin, Gary. 2006. Alfred Hitchcock’s London: A Reference Guide to London.
USA: Midnight Marquee Press.
Glancy, Mark. 2003. The 39 Steps. London: I.B.Tauris.
———. 2007. Blackmail (1929), Hitchcock and Film Nationalism. In The New
Film History: Sources, Methods and Approaches, ed. James Chapman, Mark
Glancy and Sue Harper, 185–200. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Henderson, Robert. 2008. Vladimir Burtsev and the Russian Revolutionary
Emigration: Surveillance of Foreign Political Refugees in London, 1891–
1905. PhD diss., Queen Mary, University of London.
56 P. Hirsch
Lee, Peter W. 2014. No Laughing Matter: Imperilling Kids and Country in

Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936). In Children in the Films of Alfred
Hitchcock, ed. Debbie Olson, 67–85. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Macintyre, Ben. 2010. Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story that Changed
the Course of World War II. London: Bloomsbury.
McGilligan, Patrick. 2003. Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light.
New York: HarperCollins.
Miller, Henry K. 2016. Papa du Cinema. Sight and Sound 26 (3): 36–41.
O’Brien, Scott. 2016. Sylvia Sidney: Paid by the Tear. Albany: BearManor Media.
Richards, Jeffrey, and James C. Robertson. 2009. British Film Censorship. In The
British Cinema Book, 3rd ed, ed. Robert Murphy, 67–77. London: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Russell Taylor, John. 1996. Hitch: The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock.
New York: De Capo Press.
Ryall, Tom. 1996. Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema. London: Athlone.
Sabotage: Full Treatment, May 14, 1936. British Film Institute (BFI) Special
Collections, S 230 and 231.
Sabotage (Scenario) submitted by Gaumont British Picture Corporation. BFI
Special Collections, S230 and 231.
Sargeant, Amy. 2005. British Cinema: A Critical History. London: British Film
Institute.
Smith, Susan. 2000. Hitchcock: Suspense, Humour and Tone. London: British
Film Institute/Palgrave Macmillan.
Spoto, Donald. 1999. The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock.
New York: De Capo Press.
The Illustrated Police Budget. 1894. February 24.
Truffaut, Francois. 1984. Hitchcock, Rev. ed. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Yacowar, Maurice. 2010. Hitchcock’s British Films. Detroit: Wayne State
University Press.
‘A Relic of the Bad Old Days’: Hollywood’s
London in None but the Lonely Heart
(1944)
Mark Glancy
During the 1930s and 1940s, Hollywood made many ‘British’ films.
These were films produced in Hollywood, but based on British history
and literature, which often featured a significant number of British stars
and players, and in many cases a British director or producer, as well as
British screenwriters. The films were usually based on adaptations of
well-known novels or significant episodes in the country’s history. In
the 1930s, for example, MGM produced David Copperfield (1934) and
Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Warner Bros. produced The Adventures of
Robin Hood (1938) and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939),
and Twentieth Century-Fox produced Lloyds of London (1937) and
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939). As I have argued elsewhere
(Glancy 1999, 1–4), films such as these were high-profile, lavishly made
‘prestige’ films that won critical favour and Academy Award nomina-
tions, and also played well in the exhibition markets that mattered most
to Hollywood in this era: the lucrative, first-run cinemas of the USA
M. Glancy (*) 
Queen Mary University of London, London, UK
e-mail: H.M.Glancy@qmul.ac.uk

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64979-5_5
58 M. Glancy
and Britain. If Hollywood seemed to be intent on promoting British

culture, it was a peculiarly American view of British culture—backward
looking, nostalgic, and filled with pomp and circumstance.
Contemporary London did not figure significantly in many of the
1930s films. Hollywood’s Britain was usually imagined in rural and
pre-industrial terms: as a country of idyllic public schools (Goodbye Mr.
Chips, 1939), imposing manor houses (Little Lord Fauntleroy, 1936)
and remote villages (Night Must Fall, 1937). During the war years, how-
ever, there was a marked shift toward London-set stories. One strand of
this was the period melodramas with criminal or supernatural elements,
such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), Gaslight (1944), The Lodger
(1944) and Hangover Square (1945). Another strand was contempo-
rary war films. Foreign Correspondent (1940), Confirm or Deny (1941),
Journey for Margaret (1942), A Yank in the RAF (1941), This Above All
(1942) and Tonight and Every Night (1945) portrayed the city stand-
ing up to and surviving the Blitz. Both strands are preoccupied with a
darker London. The period melodramas use expressionist lighting and
visual design to create an ‘urban gothic’ atmosphere (Barefoot 2001,
66), while the war films represent the London blackout and its associ-
ated dangers. Nevertheless, Hollywood’s London remained picturesque
in these films. It was a city shrouded in fog yet filled with architectural
and historical attractions. Its population seemed to consist entirely of
the very wealthy, their faithful servants and, to facilitate the inclusion
of Hollywood stars, perhaps a few visiting Americans. Its exact cen-
tre seemed to be marked by Big Ben, which was almost always pictured
in the films’ initial establishing shots, although occasionally St. Paul’s
Cathedral was used instead. And the city had a curious geography that
included no suburbs or slums. Whatever might lie between the garden
squares of Kensington and Chelsea, and the spacious country estates of
the English countryside, was unacknowledged in these films.
It is in this context that None but the Lonely Heart (1944) stands as
an exceptional film. Although this too is a story of a dark London, it is
neither a gothic melodrama nor a war film. Rather, the late 1930s set-
ting is represented as a time of encroaching darkness, as the economic
slump and international tensions form a gloomy fog of uncertainty
around the characters. Also exceptional is the film’s rejection of a pic-
turesque London. Even in its initial establishing shots, the film avoids
images of what Charlotte Brunsdon has defined as ‘landmark London’:
the familiar, postcard views that suggest London is a city of tourism and
‘A RELIC OF THE BAD OLD DAYS’: HOLLYWOOD’S LONDON … 59
heritage rather than a city of everyday life (Brunsdon 2007, 21–24). In a

significant break with Hollywood’s traditional view of London, the film
instead represents a ‘local London’ that is home to working-class charac-
ters (Brunsdon 57–59). It is an exceptional film too for featuring Cary
Grant—generally regarded as the most glamorous and sophisticated of
Hollywood stars—in the lead role as an unemployed and embittered
Cockney ne’er-do-well. Why was London portrayed in this unusual man-
ner in wartime? How did audiences respond to this new vision of the city
when the film was released? And what influence and impact did the film
have in subsequent years? These are the questions explored below, draw-
ing mainly from the script and production files of RKO Pictures (the stu-
dio that made the film), and the personal papers of both Cary Grant and
the film’s screenwriter and director, Clifford Odets. In the first instance,
however, it is useful to turn to the original source for the film, the novel
by Richard Llewellyn, which was published in 1943.
Llewellyn is now best remembered as the author of How Green Was
My Valley, his first novel, which was published in 1939 and adapted into
an Academy Award-winning Hollywood film in 1941. The story—an
account of a working-class boy’s coming-of-age in a Welsh mining vil-
lage—was unusual for Hollywood, but director John Ford emphasised
the strong element of nostalgia that runs through the novel. Llewellyn
claimed that his novel was based on his own experiences of growing up
in Wales. It was only after his death in 1983 that it emerged that the
author was actually born and raised in the London suburb of Hendon
(McVeigh 1999, 3). Thus, we may approach Llewellyn’s explanation of
how he came to write None but the Lonely Heart, his second novel, with
some scepticism. However, it is worth noting because it demonstrates
that he framed the story in terms of its authenticity and social purpose.
The inspiration for the story, he recalled in a preface to a paperback edi-
tion, came to him in a London courtroom, where he saw an 18-year-
old Londoner sentenced to three years in prison for taking part in a
smash and grab raid. He recounted that he was struck by the waste of
the boy’s youth and also by the boy’s defiant response to the sentenc-
ing. ‘Out on my twenty-first!’ he shouted, ‘I-yi!’. Hence, Llewellyn set
out to write a novel that would explore the boy’s outlook and experi-
ences. He claimed that he slept in East End doss houses and walked the
streets between Shoreditch and the Isle of Dogs while writing the novel
(Llewellyn 1978, 5). This points to the most distinctive and challeng-
ing aspect of the novel: it is told entirely from the point of view of its
60 M. Glancy
wayward teenage protagonist and in his own colloquial speech, includ-

ing extensive use of Cockney rhyming slang. None but the Lonely Heart
is therefore significantly different from other novels about poverty in
the 1930s Britain, such as Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (1933),
which build sympathy for the ‘respectable’ poor, and closer in spirit to
the later American novel, Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.D. Salinger,
which also confines readers to a teenager’s unreliable and often unset-
tling perspective on events.
Llewellyn named his teenage character Ernest Verdun Mott—the
middle name referring to the World War I battle the character’s father
was killed in—and portrayed him as representing a troubled post-war
generation. ‘Ernie’, as he is nicknamed, grows up fatherless, poorly
educated, fit only for low-paid work, and subject to the corrupting influ-
ence of American gangster films (‘okeedoke’ is his passive response to
almost every question or statement put to him). The feckless Ernie thus
embodies a host of factors identified in the 1930s as linked to juvenile
delinquency, and the story suggests that crime is the easiest way (if not
the only way) for such an unremarkable boy to gain status and respect.
On his path from being a failed apprentice to a gangster’s henchman,
Ernie roams through an array of neighbourhoods, and London serves
as a map for his aspirations and limitations, as well as his downfall. He
loathes the regimentation of working life in the City, where he loses his
job (as an apprentice lithographer). He is intimidated by his few forays
into the West End, where he is viewed either with suspicion or as a char-
ity case. He lives with his ‘Ma’ over the pawnshop that she runs ‘just off
the Kingsland Road’ (on the boundary of the East End neighbourhoods
of Shoreditch and Bethnal Green). They barely communicate and are in
near-constant conflict. He does not want to work for her in the shop,
and she tells him neither that she is selling stolen goods nor that she has
cancer. He is happiest in his own neighbourhood, frequenting the fish-
and-chip shop, the cinema and the fun fair, but it is at the fun fair that
he becomes besotted with the glamorous blonde cashier Ada and falls in
with a criminal gang. Ultimately, he is arrested not far from home after a
speeding car chase through the East End.
The success of How Green Was My Valley ensured that Llewellyn’s
second novel would be read eagerly in Hollywood. RKO’s Story
Department first read the novel in March 1943, six months before it was
published, and the reviewer admired it but also reported that it was ‘a
big, rich slice of London life among the Cockney folk’ that would ‘raise
the curtain on realistic pictures of London’ (Wilde 1943, 1). This was
hardly likely to whet the appetite of studio executives, who preferred
stories with well-established appeal. It would not have helped that the
gangster genre had cycled through several permutations in the 1930s
and, along with an accompanying cycle of films about juvenile delin-
quency, it had come to end by the early 1940s. RKO did not purchase
the rights for another three months. It was when studio executives heard
that Cary Grant was interested in the story that the studio moved quickly
to purchase the rights, paying a hefty $60,000 to secure them, and then
planned the film on a budget (nearly $1.3 million) that would allow
for the highest production values (Martin 1949, 22; RKO Final Cost
Summary, 1944). The investment was a demonstration of Grant’s for-
midable star power. He was not only one of the most bankable film stars,
but also a freelance or independent star, who chose which films he would
make and also exercised control over the directors and co-stars he would
work with. Initially, Alfred Hitchcock was announced as the film’s direc-
tor (Dixon 1943, 24; Heffernan 1943, 8). This was an intriguing choice.
Both Grant and Hitchcock were riding high in Hollywood at this point,
but both men came from a British working-class background. Grant’s
real name was Archie Leach, and he had grown up in Bristol, where his
father was a factory worker and his mother was confined to what was
then called the Bristol Lunatic Asylum. He left an unhappy home life at
the age of 14 to join an acrobatic troupe that toured the country’s music
halls but was based in the south London, working-class neighbourhood
of Brixton (Glancy 2016, 163–164). Hitchcock, meanwhile, came from
a slightly more affluent background. He grew up above the family’s
greengrocer’s shop in Leytonstone and then above fish-and-chip shop
in Limehouse (McGilligan 2003, 7–13). But for both star and director
the story involved a familiar environment and characters. They were also
eager to work together again, having previously collaborated on the suc-
cessful suspense-thriller Suspicion (1941). Hitchcock, however, backed
out of the project while the script was being written, and so the film that
might have been—Hitchcock’s None but the Lonely Heart—never was.
Hitchcock may have declined because of other commitments. Eager
to contribute to the war effort, he returned to Britain in December
1943 to make two propaganda films for the Ministry of Information
(McGilligan 2003, 346). But he may also have been uncomfortable with
the direction that Grant and the screenwriter Clifford Odets were tak-
ing the story. Odets was a prominent left-wing playwright, who made
62 M. Glancy
his name in New York’s radical Group Theatre. Known for his commit-
ment to dramatising proletarian lives and issues, and his belief in captur-
ing the poetry of the streets, Odets was an appropriate, if bold, choice to
adapt a novel steeped in the Cockney vernacular (Lahr 2006). He was
hired to write the screenplay at Grant’s urging, and when Hitchcock
left, Grant convinced RKO to assign Odets as director even though this
would be his first time at the helm of a film (Odets 1944b). Grant’s sup-
port for Odets did not reflect his own politics; he was never known to
be politically left wing. Rather, Grant knew that Odets would not dilute
the film’s realism with sentiment and nostalgia. This was important to
Grant partly because he saw the film as an opportunity to demonstrate
his range as an actor; he would shed his sophisticated man-about-town
image and portray a much grittier character. It was also important
because he saw the film as a form of autobiography, and a way for him to
dramatise his own impoverished and troubled childhood (Nelson 1991,
141–145). Odets was aware of this. Among Odets’ personal papers are
notes that he made before and during the production. These show that
he planned to draw on Grant’s own background; for example, referenc-
ing his experience in music hall by having him sing and play Cockney
songs on the piano (Odets 1943a). Although it was not recorded in the
script or Odets’ notes, the director and star also agreed that a framed
photograph of Grant’s father, Elias Leach, would hang on the wall of
Ma’s kitchen. The image of Elias Leach, who had died eight years earlier,
would stand in for Ernie’s father and also serve to ground the star’s per-
formance in his own childhood memories.
Odets was aware that Cary Grant was the film’s raison d’être as well as
its potential downfall. The Ernie Mott of the novel is a teenager suffering
from acne and desperately seeking a girlfriend. Grant, by contrast, was
40 years old when filming began, and he was indisputably Hollywood’s
most handsome, well-dressed and debonair star. His recent marriage to
the heiress Barbara Hutton—then known as the richest woman in the
world—had been front-page news. Hence, Odets realised that audiences
might struggle to accept Grant as Ernie Mott. The age issue was dealt
with easily enough: in the film Ernie became an unemployed wanderer
returning home rather than the novel’s wayward teen. The star’s image
and screen persona were more of a challenge. In his notes, Odets com-
mented that Grant should have ‘some physical defect’ that would dis-
tract from his good looks. He reminded himself, too, that as director he
would have to insist that Grant abandon his impeccable dress sense and
dress like a working-class man, and he reminded himself that he would
have to ‘beware of Grant’s jocularity and playing for people’s affections’

on screen (Odets 1943a, 2–3). It was unlikely, however, that Grant
would discard his screen persona entirely, and he was probably respon-
sible for the gradual softening of Ernie’s character as the script went
from the first draft in August 1943 to the final script of March 1944.
The first draft, for example, had an opening scene in which a homeless
man would ask Ernie for a cigarette and in response Ernie would throw
his lit cigarette at the man and laugh as the man struggled to catch it
(Odets 1943b, 1). In a revised script dated December 1943, Ernie kindly
gives the homeless man his entire pack of cigarettes (Odets 1943c, 1).
In what seems likely to have been a compromise, the scene was dropped
altogether by March 1944 (Odets 1944a, 1). Another compromise cen-
tred on Grant’s appearance. In the first half of the film, an unshaven and
generally unkempt Ernie wears an ill-fitting suit (see Fig. 1). But then
Fig. 1 Although Ernie Mott (Cary Grant) eventually receives an attractive new
suit of clothes from his Ma (Ethel Barrymore), in the film’s early scenes he wears
ill-fitting clothing and appears dishevelled. (None but the Lonely Heart [1944])
64 M. Glancy
Ma buys him a new suit in return for his help in the shop, and when
he puts on the new suit he suddenly appears not just well dressed but
also well groomed, smiling and confident. Or, as the December 1943
script describes the transformation, when Ernie puts on the suit ‘he
looks like Cary Grant’ (Odets 1943c, 66). If this was a compromise on
Odets’ part, it at least served the dramatic purpose of foreshadowing
Ernie’s quest for money and status, which would lead him into crime.
For Grant, the scene also drew a direct link between the ordinary man
and the extraordinary star, and this element of autobiography was what
interested him most in the story.
With other aspects of the production, Odets was uncompromising,
and the authority he was given suggests that he had Grant’s firm back-
ing. For example, Odets’ first script described the street that Ernie and
Ma live as ‘a real slum street’ with ‘filth and squalor everywhere’ (Odets
1943b, 11), but when he saw the designs that RKO’s art department
had made for the set, he rejected them as too ‘picturesque’:
This place is so pretty that I’d like to live in it myself. What I want … is
not a relic of the good old days but a relic of the bad old days. This street
must be the villain of the story; it is the sinister, primary reason for the
whole dramatic chain of events. (Gorelik 1946, 91)
At Odets’ request, another Group Theatre veteran, Mordecai Gorelik,

was brought on to the production to design a very different set for the
street. It was a vast construction by studio standards, costing nearly
$33,000 to build; five times more than any other set used in the film
(Final Cost Summary 1944). Yet with a railway bridge at one end, a nar-
row road, and long rows of cramped terraced houses on either side, the
set effectively recreated a drab, tree-less, claustrophobic London back-
street on a Hollywood sound stage (see Fig. 2). The original design for
Ma’s shop was also found to be far too spacious and its products too
desirable. Instead, Gorelik’s new design emphasised ‘the pathetic small-
ness’ of the shop and the ‘sordid poverty of the things on sale’ (Gorelik
1946). Odets’ papers reveal that he refused to rely on the studio’s cos-
tume designers and research department. He conducted his own research
into ordinary London life and people. He made extensive notes about
Cockney expressions, rhyming slang, manners and demeanour. He
researched London’s criminal gangs in the 1930s, recording that gangs
often operated around dog racing tracks, and that slashing people with
Fig. 2 Director Clifford Odets insisted that the vast and very expensive street
set should be appropriately drab rather than picturesque. (None but the Lonely
Heart [1944])
razors was their primary means of harm. He viewed drawings of elderly

working-class women and noted that Ma should look like a charlady. He
noted that Ernie’s faithful dog, which follows him everywhere, should be
chosen ‘not for cuteness but for a man’s loneliness’. His research led him
to comment that ‘Cockneys have a similarity to American Negroes’, pre-
sumably referring to the extraordinary and systematic disadvantages that
both groups faced (Odets 1943d, 2).
From the beginning, Odets rewrote the story as one that looks for-
ward to World War II. Ernie would begin as a free spirit, who, in the
early drafts of the script, insists that he will not fight if war comes
(Odets 1943c, 44). He would then become involved with organised
crime, and finally realise in the ending that he must fight alongside ‘the
man who will fight for a human way of life’. In this respect, Odets’ story
fits with a US centre-left political philosophy, promoted by the Roosevelt
66 M. Glancy
administration and the Office of War Information, which saw the war
in socio-political as well as military terms. It was a fight for the Four
Freedoms—freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from want and
fear—and victory would see the triumph of social democratic values and
the defeat of fascism throughout the world (Koppes and Black 1988,
66–67). Thus, the story begins in Westminster Abbey, at the Tomb of
the Unknown Warrior, and with an American narrator pronouncing that
Ernie Mott’s eventual destiny lay in becoming ‘a warrior of the Second
World War’. But before this destiny can be realised, the story takes us
through the long night of the 1930s. Without speaking the word ‘capi-
talism’, the film characterises the pre-war economic order as one which
forces people into the role of being either ‘a hare or a hound’. In his
mother’s shop, Ernie observes the poverty of his neighbours—a young
girl who must save for 27 weeks to buy a new pair of shoes, a woman
who begs for more money when she pawns a birdcage—and he objects
to Ma’s business on the grounds that they are ‘squeezing pennies out
of devils poorer than ourselves’. He recoils when Ma serves him sheep’s
heart for dinner. ‘Are we really this poor?’ he asks. Ma, played by Ethel
Barrymore as a bitter realist, answers tiredly, ‘Millions worse off, son.’
In a climactic moment, Ernie angrily tells his mother that he wants
‘Peace! Peace with pride to have a decent human life’. Her reply, ‘You
won’t find anything like that in this world—not in our time,’ obliquely
references Neville Chamberlain’s claim to have achieved ‘peace in our
time’ through the policy of appeasing Nazi Germany, and thus links the
tolerance of poverty with the tolerance of fascism. Similarly, when the
gangster’s henchmen attack a Jewish shop owner, Ernie is disgusted and
breaks with the gang. As Peter Wollen has observed, this suggests a link
between racketeering and Nazis, and it suggests that Ernie’s rejection
of the gang is a rejection of fascism (Wollen 1998, 18–22). The war is
also referred to in the penultimate scene. As Ernie and his friend, Twite
(Barry Fitzgerald), stand on the Embankment and the clouds finally
begin to part, they look out at the Thames and Ernie asks, ‘When’s the
world coming out of its midnight?’ As he asks, three planes pass over-
head with their engines roaring, reinforcing the idea that the war will
bring about the better world that Ernie imagines.
Like so many of Hollywood ‘British’ films, None but the Lonely Heart
was filmed almost entirely in Hollywood, and on studio sets that recre-
ated an array of London settings (Final Cost Summary 1944). Admittedly,
many of these films have an artificial, studio-bound quality in common,
but Odets and Gorelik exaggerate the falseness of the London seen
in None but the Lonely Heart. Its foggy darkness serves as a Brechtian
device, refusing to allow audiences pleasurable views of the city, and urg-
ing them to maintain a critical distance from the highly stylised drama.
The first scene, set in Westminster Abbey, does not offer an establishing
shot of the exterior or interior of the Abbey but instead remains tightly
focussed on Ernie and the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior. Similarly, the
scenes that take place on the Embankment have no views of the skyline
or river, and the darkness and fog make it impossible to place the exact
location of the scenes. Ernie looks out at the river, but the river itself is
not seen. The audience must imagine what he sees, and see the turmoil,
change, and movement of the water reflected in his face. The only real or
actual footage used in the film is a brief shot of Big Ben (actually a still
photograph), which is seen twice. Given that the film otherwise refuses to
illuminate ‘landmark London’, it is worth contemplating why this shot is
used. In both instances, the image is seen just before Ernie and Ada (June
Duprez) go on a date, and so its most obvious function is to indicate that
they are out on the town rather than in their own neighbourhood. But
it is no ordinary view of Big Ben. The still was shot at night, from a very
low angle, and with the statue Boadicea and Her Daughters (which stands
nearby in Parliament Square) in the foreground. Thus, the film renders Big
Ben—the symbol of parliamentary power—as a site of conflict rather than
as a reassuring, much-loved landmark of a familiar cinematic city. This is
entirely in keeping with the film’s unsettling representation of London.
The expressionist lighting designs employed in and around the Motts’
home (including the intensely shadowy passage beneath the railway arch at
the bottom of the street), and the often dissonant musical score composed
by Hanns Eisler, work to the same effect.
There is a slight nod towards a conventional romantic ending in the
final scene. Ernie is seen walking towards home, and just as the camera
backs up and away, he turns to the door of his neighbour Aggie (Jane
Wyatt), a young cellist who earlier played Tchaikovsky’s ‘None but the
Lonely Heart’ on her cello and also declared her love for him. If this
briefly hopeful ending was an attempt to make the film more commer-
cially appealing, it failed to sway the film industry’s trade press. When
they saw the film in October 1944, they warned exhibitors that it
was ‘too slow’, its settings ‘drab’ and its Cockney accents ‘unintelligi-
ble’ (Abel 1944, 8; Film Daily 1944, 6; Harrison’s Reports 1944, 162;
Motion Picture Herald 1944, 2129). Mainstream American film critics
68 M. Glancy
were also preoccupied with the film’s commercial prospects, but this
was because they pondered whether such an admirably ambitious film
could find a wide audience. ‘However the film makes out financially,’
Time magazine concluded, ‘it is one of the pictures of the year, a feather
in the cap of all concerned in its making’ (Time 1944). American crit-
ics especially admired the performances of the stars. Cary Grant was
doubtless pleased to see comments such as Edwin Schallert’s, in the Los
Angeles Times, complimenting his ‘varied capacity as an actor’ (Schallert
1944, 5). Critics also lauded the return to film of Broadway legend
Ethel Barrymore, who had not appeared in a film for more than a dec-
ade. There was less consensus about the film’s visual design. James Agee,
who favoured documentary realism, found this film’s studio-bound
and highly stylised realism ‘too luscious for my tastes’ (Agee 1944,
114–115). But one of the country’s most prominent critics, Bosley
Crowther of the New York Times, praised the ‘poetic quality’ of the film,
which he found ‘sensitive’ and ‘haunting’ (Crowther 1944, 2/1). It
was named the best film of the year by the National Board of Review,
and Ethel Barrymore’s performance was awarded with a ‘best actress’
Oscar, while Cary Grant was nominated as ‘best actor’ but did not win.
Commercially, the film turned out to be Grant’s first box-office flop in
many years (Jewell 1994, Appendix 1).
In Britain, critical responses to the film were not sympathetic. Among
the leading critics, only Dilys Powell, the highly regarded critic for the
Sunday Times, commented that None but the Lonely Heart should be
‘respected as a film imaginatively and poetically conceived’ (Powell
1945). Other critics took umbrage at the representation of London in
a film made thousands of miles away. ‘This London bears no resem-
blance to the London of any living Londoner,’ C.A. Lejeune complained
in the Observer, pointing out that Big Ben ‘is not within strolling dis-
tance of the East End’ (Lejeune 1945, 2). The critic for the Monthly
Film Bulletin similarly disapproved of ‘the implied transfer of Big Ben
and the Embankment to the East End’. This seemingly nitpicking criti-
cism masked two forms of resentment. One was a common response
to Hollywood’s ‘British’ films: resentment that a foreign film industry
should encroach upon native themes and stories. Hence, the Monthly
Film Bulletin compared None but the Lonely Heart to the recent British
film Waterloo Road (1945), and found that the former was ‘too poetic’,
while the plainer and more precise realism of the latter ‘set the standard’
for authentic London films (K.F.B. 1945, 14). There was resentment
too over the gloomy representation of London. Whereas earlier ‘British’

films had portrayed the pluck and courage of Londoners in the Blitz,
this film, coming at the end of the war, suggested that London was a
tired city. ‘The Cockneys of this film are lost in a strange, vague, brood-
ing mysticism,’ Edgar Anstey complained in the Spectator, stating that
the mood was ‘more Russian than English’ (Anstey 1945, 11). In the
Daily Telegraph, Campbell Dixon also resented ‘the piling up of miser-
ies [and the] emphasis on defeat and violence’ (Dixon 1945). Richard
Winnington of the News Chronicle similarly questioned the film’s ‘futile
gloom and wild geography’ (Winnington 1945).
None but the Lonely Heart nevertheless proved to be an influential film
in Britain. As Peter Wollen has observed, the East-End setting, gangster
drama, and expressionist design served as a model for a cycle of post-
war British crime films. Wollen cites Cavalcanti’s They Made Me a Fugitive
(1947) as one descendant of the film (Wollen 1998, 22). Another is
Ealing’s It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), and, not least for its shadowy
East-End street scenes, Noose (1948), another adaptation of a London
racketeering drama by Richard Llewellyn. If None but the Lonely Heart
brought a flourishing of noir to London films, its legacy in the USA was
more troubling. In the 1947 House Un-American Activities Committee
hearings, the film was cited as an example of how communist propaganda
was spread through films. Ernie’s reference to ‘squeezing pennies out
of the poor’ and the film’s emphasis on ‘despair and hopelessness’ were
regarded as subversive (Edwards 1947, 4). This might seem laughable
now, but at the time there were dire consequences. Clifford Odets was
required to ‘name names’ before the committee or face career ruin, while
the film’s musical composer, the Austrian-born Hanns Eisler, was black-
listed and then deported from the USA (Kanstroom 2007, 201–202).
The accusation that a film based on a British novel, set in London, and
starring a British-born actor was ‘un-American’ was illogical to say the
least. But it serves as a reminder that in the 1940s, this was an unusual
Hollywood film and an especially unusual portrait of London life—one as
startling for its visual design as it was for its portrayal of poverty. Looking
back from a modern perspective, we might view Ernie Mott as a fore-
runner of Michael Caine’s charismatic Alfie (1965), but, unlike Alfie,
Ernie could not cross the river and join in London’s pleasurable dis-
tractions; he was in effect stranded on the Embankment. We might also
compare the film with the later, brighter, cheerier portraits of London
life seen in My Fair Lady (1964) and Mary Poppins (1964). These films
70 M. Glancy
certainly represented Cockney London in a manner that was more palat-

able for international audiences. But such comparisons can distract from
the unique qualities of None but the Lonely Heart: a film that brought
together a novel about a juvenile delinquent, the aesthetics of the Group
Theatre, an everyday East End of fish-and-chips and fun fairs, and the
charm of Hollywood’s most glamorous star, to form one of the most dis-
tinctive visions of London on film.
References
Abel. 1944. None but the Lonely Heart. Variety, October 4.
Agee, James. 1944. None but the Lonely Heart. The Nation, December 2.
Reprinted in Agee on Film: Criticism and Comment on the Movies, by James
Agee, 114–115. New York: Modern Library.
Anstey, Edgar. 1945. The Cinema. Spectator, March 2.
Barefoot, Guy. 2001. Gaslight Melodrama: From Victorian London to 1940s
Hollywood. London: Continuum.
Brunsdon, Charlotte. 2007. London in Cinema: The Cinematic City since 1945.
Crowther, Bosley. 1944. In A Poetic Vein. New York Times, December 3.
Dixon, Campbell. 1945. Film Notes. Daily Telegraph, February 26.
Dixon, Hugh. 1943. Hollywood. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, November 3.
Edwards, William. 1947. Disney Reveals Red Battle to Rule His Studio. Chicago
Daily Tribune, October 25.
Film Daily [author not indicated]. 1944. None but the Lonely Heart. Film
Daily, October 3.
Final Cost Summary, dated. October 18, 1944, None but the Lonely Heart pro-
duction files, box 140P. RKO Radio Pictures Studio Records (Collection
PASC 3). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research
Library, University of California, Los Angeles [Hereafter RKO/UCLA].
Glancy, Mark. 1999. When Hollywood Loved Britain: The Hollywood ‘British’
Film, 1939–45. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.
Glancy, Mark. 2016. The Awful Truth about Cary Grant. In Hollywood and the Great
Depression: American Film, Politics and Society in the 1930s, eds. Iwan Morgan and
Philip John Davies, 139–158. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Gorelik, Mordecai. 1946. Hollywood’s Art Machinery. Sight and Sound 59:
90–91.
Harrison’s Reports [author not indicated]. 1944. None but the Lonely Heart.
Harrison’s Reports, October 7.
Heffernan, Harold. 1943. In Hollywood. Hartford Daily Courant, October 22.
Jewell, Richard B. 1994. RKO Film Grosses, 1929–1951: The C.J. Tevlin
Ledger. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 1: Appendix 1.
Kanstroom, Dan. 2007. Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History.

Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.
K.F.B. 1945. None but the Lonely Heart. Monthly Film Bulletin, February 28.
Koppes, Clayton R., and Gregory D. Black. 1988. Hollywood Goes to War: How
Politics, Profits and Propaganda Shaped World War Two Movies. London and
New York: I.B.Tauris.
Lahr, John. 2006. Stage Left: The Struggles of Clifford Odets. New Yorker, April
17. Accessed 1 Mar 2017. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/
04/17/stage-left.
Lejeune, C.A. 1945. The Films. Observer, February 25.
Llewellyn, Richard. 1978. None but the Lonely Heart. London: Nel Books.
Martin, Pete. 1949. How Grant Took Hollywood. Saturday Evening Post,
February 19.
McGilligan, Patrick. 2003. Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and in Light.
New York: Regan/HarperCollins.
McVeigh, Tracey. 1999. How Phoney Was My Valley. Observer, December 5.
Motion Picture Herald [author not indicated]. 1944. None but the Lonely
Heart. Motion Picture Herald, October 7.
Nelson, Nancy. 1991. Evenings with Cary Grant: Recollections in His Own Words
by Those Who Knew Him Best. New York: William Morrow.
Odets, Clifford. 1943a. Notes: Ernie, Box 19, Produced Screenplays, Writings
Subseries 2, Clifford Odets Papers Series IV, Billy Rose Theatre Collection,
New York Public Library, New York [Hereafter Odets/NYPL].
Odets, Clifford. 1943b. Screenplay dated August 20, None but the Lonely Heart
script files, Box 988S. RKO/UCLA.
Odets, Clifford. 1943c. Screenplay dated December 18, None but the Lonely
Heart script files, Box 988S. RKO/UCLA.
Odets, Clifford. 1943d. Research for the film. Box 18, Odets/NYPL.
Odets, Clifford. 1944a. Screenplay dated March 6, None but the Lonely Heart
script files, Box 988S. RKO/UCLA.
Odets, Clifford. 1944b. Letter to Cary Grant dated June 28. File 55, Box 5,
Cary Grant Papers, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles.
Powell, Dilys. 1945. Films of the Week. Sunday Times, February 25 [BFI micro-
fiche clippings].
Schallert, Edwin. 1944. Grant, Barrymore Star in Murky Story. Los Angeles
Times, October 21.
Time [author not indicated]. 1944. Cinema. Time, November 20 [BFI micro-
fiche clippings].
Wilde, Alexander. 1943. Report on None but the Lonely Heart, RKO Story
Department, dated March 31, Box 988S. RKO/UCLA.
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February 24 [BFI microfiche clippings].
Wollen, Peter. 1998. Riff-Raff Realism. Sight and Sound 4: 18–22.
London Can Take It: Documentary
Reconstructions of the City
Michael McCluskey
Introduction
In Patrick Keiller’s London (1994) a shot of a bombed building opens
up discussions about the city’s potential and the state of the nation. The
unseen narrator suggests that the empty structure looks like the build-
ing site it was only a few years ago, thus positioning the damage within a
dialectic of development: building site, workplace, empty shell. The film
imagines that one day the City of London will be populated by poets and
artists, a prediction that critiques what it sees as the hollowing out of the
city by global capitalism and its privileging of the ‘non-places’ of super-
modernity (Augé 2000, 75). The bombed building provides a pause to
reflect over this specific damage but more broadly over London property.
Who occupies it? Who shapes it? What does it signify? And how might it
be mapped? These questions are still relevant today—as well as to inter-
rogations of earlier cycles in the city’s history.
This chapter looks at the bombed-out landscapes of 1940s London
and the images of the city documentary filmmakers constructed from
these fragments. In the early days of World War II, all eyes were on
M. McCluskey (*) 
University of York, York, UK
e-mail: michael.mccluskey@york.ac.uk

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64979-5_6
74 M. McCLUSKEY
London to see if its citizens would survive German bombings and sus-
tain the steely effort needed to win on the home front. The city that
had been seen as the ‘Great Wen’ needed to be resignified as the heart
of Britain in order to build a national coalition at home and bolster the
support of its allies. To achieve these aims, these films, I argue, imagined
London as a city of symbols, repurposed spaces, and redundant streets
that could be reduced to rubble without impacting community spirit.
Through close readings of films such as London Can Take It! (1940),
Listen to Britain (1942), Out of Chaos (1944), and A Diary for Timothy
(1946) I examine the use of urban space to promote plans for national
mobilisation and to consider what Mark Tewdwr-Jones calls film’s capac-
ity to provide ‘a holistic interpretation of materially substantial interven-
tions in the urban’ (2013, 89). These films, I contend, construct images
of wholeness from fragments of a bombed landscape and can help us to
consider documentary itself as a process of excavation, reconstruction,
and reimagining of the familiar. In particular, they help to construct what
Colin McArthur calls ‘a new cinematic discourse of London’ (1997,
35) that gathered its material not only from the famous, historic sites of
the city but also from the ‘streets and cities and slums and markets and
exchanges and factories’ (Grierson 1946, 84) and other often overlooked
spaces that John Grierson saw as essential material for the documentary
mode of filmmaking.
Mobilisation
Plans for wartime mobilisation included propaganda campaigns to bring
the nation together to defend the homeland and to project an image of
strength to both enemies and allies. The beginning of German bomb-
ing created a threat not just to the city but also to national morale. In
response, documentary films were produced to prove that London—
and Britain—could take it. These films use the bombed landscape of
London to provide evidence of survival and to construct from the frag-
ments narratives of intactness. Leo Mellor argues that ‘writers of the
Blitz meditate on what kind of creation is made possible in this mael-
strom’ (2011, 48) and looks at their works to consider as well mod-
ernism’s ‘ability to assign signification to the fragmentation of form
and content’ (2011, 4). Wartime filmmakers were also part of this pro-
cess and synthesise city fragments into scenes of local community and
national heritage.
LONDON CAN TAKE IT: DOCUMENTARY RECONSTRUCTIONS OF THE CITY 75
The Ministry of Information publication Front Line 1940–1941

(1942) describes the ‘two fronts’ (Ministry of Home Security and
Ministry of Information 1942, 81) of civil defence as ‘the moral and the
material, or if it be preferred, the social and the physical’ (141). Physical
damage to London was used to convey the death and personal loss
caused by the Blitz in films that could not reveal such details explicitly
because of restrictions on the release of wartime information. What these
films present is a city whose identity and sense of community remain
intact. Indeed, images of national monuments still standing and peo-
ple carrying on with their everyday lives helped to suggest that, in the
words of filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, London ‘has settled down to a
big village-like existence’ (Jennings 1942). Jennings’ documentaries and
those of his fellow wartime filmmakers helped to construct the image of
London as a close, connected community and captured the transforma-
tions that he observes amid the ruins and regrowth:
Most of the damage demolished and cleared up. Endless allotments—

beds of potatoes, onions, lettuces—in parks, in the new open spaces from
bombing, tomatoes climbing up ruins—trees and shrubs overgrowing
evacuated and empty houses and gardens—in some places shells of eight-
eenth century cottages with black blank windows and Rousseau-like for-
ests enveloping them, straying out over the road—no railings—climbing in
windows. (Jennings 1942)
Jennings expresses the impact of the bombings in exaggerated, almost

surrealist imagery yet his description points out the elements of war-
time films that I dissect: historic buildings, ruins, and repurposed spaces.
As other studies have emphasised the surrealism of certain sequences
in these films (Winston 1999; Jackson 2004), I want to draw attention
to the ways in which they ‘illuminate the lived spaces of the city’ (Shiel
2001, 6) and communicate convergence amid the chaos through their
cinematic excavations of London.
Symbolic City
‘It is remarkable what an amount of bombing a city can take and remain
itself’, Jennings wrote just after the Blitz (1940). His comments refer
to the resilient attitude of the people and to the persistence of a recog-
nisable landscape despite the damage. Because German bombing did
76 M. McCLUSKEY
not destroy London’s most familiar landmarks, the city still looked like
its old self, identifiable to audiences in other areas of Britain as well as
abroad. London is one example of what Tim Edensor describes as an
‘ideologically loaded’ landscape in which ‘iconic sites are highly selective,
synecdochal features which are held to embody specific kinds of charac-
teristics’ (2002, 45). Wartime documentary films draw on and contrib-
ute to the iconic status of certain buildings by using them as symbols of
stability and survival. They—and the nation—will survive these events,
the films suggest, through their shots of ‘landmark London’ (Brunsdon
2007, 21).
St Paul’s, the Big Ben tower, and Houses of Parliament represent the
history of the nation as well as the city of London. Shots of these build-
ings serve as reminders of what is at stake for wartime Britons as well as
a way to communicate location, national identity, history, culture, and
the current threat. These and the buildings themselves were in danger of
being lost, and films and other forms of propaganda used London land-
marks to convey both vulnerability and defiance. A sequence in Listen
to Britain underscores the link between these famous buildings and the
broadcasting of national identity. A shot of the Big Ben tower as dawn
breaks is paired with the sounds of the Westminster chime to mark the
start of a new day of the public service and private moments that the film
documents. The image of Big Ben then dissolves into a shot of a radio
tower as the voice of a BBC broadcaster announces ‘This is London call-
ing’. The film connects the famous building with broadcasting through a
montage sequence that speaks to the use of landmarks in wartime docu-
mentaries in general, that is, the use of ‘public spaces and monumental
architecture in which the spirit of the city or the grandeur of a nation can
be expressed’ (Boyer 1996, 18). Wartime documentaries draw on and
contribute to what Edensor calls ‘the spatial construction’ (2002, 49)
of national identity through their symbolic use of famous sites, and they
evoke a sense of civic responsibility, a reminder that these iconic images
must be protected.
In Listen to Britain, London Can Take It!, and Fires Were Started
(1943) one of these three buildings is what marks the transition in the
film from night to morning. It is the first image we see as dawn breaks
in each of the films as a means of indicating that the city has survived.
This presentation of the public London, the city put on display, is linked
to the public duty of the wartime citizen. These films are filled with
examples of the new roles citizens assumed as part of the war effort.
The public face of London, the one familiar even to those who have
never visited it, symbolises this public effort, and the protection of its
most famous buildings helps to communicate the defence of the nation
not only by the armed forces but also by the ordinary Londoners serving
in new wartime roles as volunteer firefighters and air wardens on duty to
spot incoming bombers. Films show these people at work and put rec-
ognisable buildings within the frame as a reminder of what everyone is
fighting for. In Ordinary People (1941) a shot of a man on duty to spot
the German bombers positions the dome of St Paul’s in the background
just behind him. Another shot presents a man atop a roof to watch for
bombers with the Houses of Parliament just across the river. And the
film War and Order (1940) ends with a shot of a policeman directing
traffic in Parliament Square framed against the Big Ben tower. The pro-
tector and protected, the ordinary and the famous, are included in the
same frame to create a sense of responsibility—and ‘imagined commu-
nity’ (Anderson 2006, 25)—among wartime audiences. But as the films
were also intended to appease the fears of audiences, these instances of
national security also suggest that the landmarks are sentinels themselves,
on duty to protect the city and nation that they represent. Christine
Boyer argues that ‘places and monuments transfer meaning and knowl-
edge across generations’ and ‘actually generate memory and inscribe
civic conduct’ (Boyer 1996, 17). In these wartime films it is their intact-
ness not just their identity that gives them meaning. They symbolise
strength because they survive; they are whole and wholly recognisable
and thus remind viewers that the city and nation itself remain intact
despite the ruins they rise above.
Bombed Buildings
In 1942 the Architectural Review published a book on bombed build-
ings that asked for them ‘to be looked at for the sake of what they are at
the moment. It has always been the role of the ruin to compress into the
same picture both the embodiment of historical experience and the form
and colour of architecture itself. Hence its romantic appeal’ (Richards
1942, 2). In wartime documentaries bombed buildings are sites of
memorialisation and mobilisation, a dual function that London Can Take
It! captures in two matching shots. In the first, what looks like a grave-
stone sits in the midst of ruins. In the second, the grave is replaced by a
growing tree, a sign of life rising from the rubble and a suggestion of the
78 M. McCLUSKEY
Fig. 1 A tree grows amid a bomb-damaged building in London Can Take It!
(1940)
‘soothing greening of the ruins’ (Mellor 2011, 167) that came as plant
life took root and thrived (see Fig. 1).
The resignifying of scenes of death into signs of hope was something
expected of wartime propaganda. But in presenting frequent images of
London’s damaged landscape, the films also document the city’s fragility
and the obstacles citizens had to overcome in their daily lives—as well as
the ‘aesthetic of destruction’ (Richards 1942, 3) that marked such strik-
ing images. Rubble-strewn streets, collapsed buildings, piles of debris:
these are Shiel’s ‘lived spaces’ for wartime Londoners.
‘The nightly siege of London has begun,’ the narrator of London
Can Take It! announces against a shot of an unidentified row of terrace
houses overlooking a square. The image is both iconic and anonymous
as such rows of houses and garden squares with railings are identifi-
ably London yet not linked to a specific square in the film. As Charlotte
Brunsdon argues, ‘the eschewing of landmark London can be as
significant as its imagining’ (2007, 24). Wartime documentary films take

viewers through unidentified areas of London to capture damage across
the city and to communicate the message that despite such destruction
the city remained intact. Filmmakers isolate collapsed buildings, crum-
bled facades, and flattened plots and stitch them back into the urban fab-
ric as sites of remembrance and signs of a city in progress.
Bombed sites and debris piles were a familiar part of London’s land-
scape. According to Stephen Spender, just as the trench came to sym-
bolise World War I, ‘the bombed city’ (Spender 1945, 101) became
the iconic image of World War II. Films offer an architectural tour of
damage but resist instilling rubble fatigue among audiences by moving
quickly through almost postcard-like images rather than lingering over
instances of destruction. London Can Take It! flashes a shot of a debris
pile next to the monument to the Fire of London; shows a bus upended
against a house; and presents part of a collapsed crescent in which
‘the Nash pillars look as brittle as sugar’ (Bowen 1940, 220). Listen to
Britain includes a sequence of a man briskly walking with his gas mask
alongside a damaged building propped up by scaffolding that the cam-
era sweeps over. And Fires Were Started, as I have discussed elsewhere,
‘documents the blasted houses and blocked streets through a series of
static images that cut quickly from one to the next’ like a slide show
intended to illustrate a lecture (McCluskey 2016, 47). In these instances
the films ‘take stock of the damage done’, as the narrator of London Can
Take It! announces, and find evidence to share with audiences about the
impact of German bombing. They also position the viewer in the action
as the camera and sound technology bear witness to these events. London
Can Take It! assures audiences that ‘these are not Hollywood sound
effects’ in a sequence that captures the sounds and flashes of light from
a night of bombings. In the morning-after sequence that follows, the
viewer is placed in the middle of a road now blocked by bomb damage.
Another shot places the viewer within a bombed building itself as the
camera looks out of blasted windows onto a crowd moving past along
the pavement. These are intermixed with shots of individual Londoners
responding to the damage they see around them and so help to provide
audiences with a sense of the obstacles Londoners face as they negotiate
the changed urban landscape.
Just ahead of the outbreak of war Cyril Joad predicted ‘that large
parts of London will be in flames, that the streets will be contaminated
with gas, and that hordes of fugitives will spread outwards from the city’
80 M. McCLUSKEY
(Overy 2013, 52). These events did not happen entirely but German
bombing certainly brought elements of chaos, confusion, and catas-
trophe to people living in London. While wartime documentaries cata-
logue the material damage, they do not provide a record of the chaotic
responses and the complaints many Londoners had about provision for
shelters, wartime restrictions, and other difficulties they faced as part
of the wartime regime. Instead, films construct sequences of collabora-
tion, orderly behaviour, and use bomb damage to illustrate the build-
ing of community. As Picture Post reported in 1940 ‘the pieces of a life
so violently disturbed must be put together again’ (Picture Post 1940,
18), and documentary films order images to communicate the ‘village-
like’ existence that Jennings and others attached to life amid Londoners
at war. Ordinary People brings neighbours together after a house is com-
pletely destroyed in an outer suburb. Oddly, it seems the two families did
not really know each other despite living across the street, yet the bomb
Fig. 2 Circulation through the city in London Can Take It! (1940)
blast triggers community support. London Can Take It! is filled with
shots of crowds circulating through bomb-damaged streets (see Fig. 2).
Sequences of people gathering on the streets in the aftermath of the
night-time bombing are intercut with images of people digging through
damage as part of recovery efforts. Both groupings, the film suggests,
help to sustain morale and keep the city safe as people looked out for
each other and not just their own property. Personal belongings piled on
the street as damaged houses are deemed uninhabitable mark the per-
sonal loss and the public display of private grief. A sequence of the King
and Queen observing bomb damage offers another example of the pub-
lic performance expected of wartime citizens, a performance that docu-
mentary film captured and helped to construct.
A Diary for Timothy (1946), filmed in the final days of the war, offers
one of the most striking images of wartime damage seen in these films.
Three children walk down a street between two enormous piles of bomb
damage (see Fig. 3). Their movement is slightly upward, ahead, towards
Fig. 3 Signs of containment in A Diary for Timothy (1946)

82 M. McCLUSKEY
a block of flats that look like those advertised in interwar documenta-

ries on London housing. They walk through an urban canyon of dev-
astation but do so seemingly unthreatened and undeterred on their
direct path. The sequence serves as an example of the treatment of war
damage throughout the films: a sign of containment and evidence that
Londoners can carry on as a community intact.
Repurposed Spaces
The wartime regime insisted that people take on new responsibili-
ties. Those that remained in London, in addition to their usual jobs,
were asked to serve as volunteer firemen, safety wardens, spotters for
incoming German bombers, and mobile canteen workers, among other
duties to protect the city and help those who suffered from the bomb-
ings. Buildings too took on additional roles as London adapted to the
needs of a still-functioning city that needed to keep citizens safe as well
as productive. ‘That Monday morning workers left their tube trains to
face a new world, where everything seemed strange,’ the film The First
Days (1940) describes the immediate events after the declaration of war
and offers instances of this strange, new world. A large section of Hyde
Park was dug up and turned into a sandpit where bags could be filled,
the sight of the Albert Memorial in the background the only marker to
identify the specific site. A plastic pond outside the Temple tube stop
awaits any fires it was constructed to help combat. Throughout the city
sandbags and other protective barriers reframe buildings and redistrib-
ute traffic as part of what the film calls the ‘adaptability and enterprise’
of wartime London. Adaptability and enterprise was the underlying mes-
sage of interwar films about redeveloping London and wartime films that
looked ahead to reconstruction.
As The First Days documents, the National Gallery was emptied of
its artwork in order for its collection to be protected. But the building
itself became a centre of wartime city life according to the films Listen
to Britain and Out of Chaos (1944). ‘It used not to look like this in
the old days of peace’, the narrator of Out of Chaos tells us, and both
films document the different uses of the building and those who visited
it during the day. In wartime it became a concert venue, a gallery for
the War Artists’ Exhibition, a place to eat your lunch, to meet others,
and to watch people. In Listen to Britain, a shot of large empty frames
reminds the viewer that the permanent collection has been removed for
its safety, something the nearby sandbags also suggest. These images sig-
nal the danger the people in the building face as they indicate that the
building is a potential bombsite. But they also help to communicate the
message that despite the loss of the building’s primary purpose—the dis-
play of art—it still serves a special function and attracts people despite
the dangers. London Can Take It! is filled with transformed spaces. A
shop window becomes a new entryway, men play darts in a shelter that
replaces the pub, and sandbag structures are pop-up shelters and forms
of defence. In The Culture of Cities (1938) the urban historian and theo-
rist Lewis Mumford argued that ‘the capacity for renewal’ was ‘one of
the most important attributes of a vital urban environment’. ‘Against
the fixed shell and the static monument,’ he wrote, ‘the new architec-
ture places its faith in the powers of social adaptation and reproduction’
(1970, 433). These transformative powers—the ability of city space to
shape social interactions and, in turn, for such interactions to shape our
perceptions of city spaces—drive films that offer a revision of London.
Interwoven with images of ‘landmark London’ and the bombed city is
an urban landscape that communicates its potential through the repur-
posing of public space. Wartime documentary films map these spaces and
anticipate the new architectures of post-war redevelopment.
During the war, the city went underground. Documentaries offer sev-
eral instances of how tube stations and other underground areas were
used. Ordinary People suggests how commonplace subterranean activities
became. The film opens with a sequence of a group of otherwise stran-
gers gathering in the shelter they share each night. It then follows the
members of this group through their daily routines. A shop girl takes up
her responsibilities as a safety warden once an air raid siren sounds and
leads customers to the underground canteen where tea and ‘Air Raid
Snacks’ are served. A judge interrupts courtroom proceedings because of
the sighting of German bombers and reconvenes the session in the base-
ment of the building. People adapted to carrying on with daily life in new
arenas, particularly underground areas safe from the impact of bombs.
Many films document the transformation of London Underground sta-
tions into dormitories, one of the most prominent symbols of wartime
community and the idea that everyone got along easily that undergirds
what Angus Calder calls ‘the myth of the Blitz’. The films do not explic-
itly engage in any of the debates about the use of Underground stations
as shelters, something originally resisted by local and national govern-
ment (Calder 1991, 34). But their use in the films serve as evidence of
84 M. McCLUSKEY
successful public campaigns to shelter in the Underground, a campaign

that included the forced occupation of these spaces by people in protest.
The films also suggest that such spaces are logical, comfortable ways to
house large groups of people. In A Diary for Timothy the camera pans
over a row of bunk beds set against a wall with a London Underground
map and advertisements. Space not used at night is recommissioned to
fulfil the needs of the crowds that pass through there during the day.
Something the government initially resisted is presented in an official film
as a state-sanctioned use of city space.
A Diary for Timothy spends much of its time discussing plans for the
rebuilding of Britain. The ‘question of re-housing’ was one of the big-
gest concerns, a carryover from the interwar period, and an issue exacer-
bated by the large amount of homes lost because of bombings and their
aftermath (Ward 1942, 35). A sequence in the film shows the construc-
tion of pre-fab houses as an effort to familiarise audiences with these
new architectures through a strategy similar to 1930s films about mod-
ernist housing estates. Here, the houses are shown as an effective solu-
tion to ordering the post-war landscape. The specific location of these
houses is not identified, as a means of suggesting that this solution could
be applied to multiple areas of the nation, part of what Anthony Vidler
identifies as ‘an immediate response to and palliative for the destruc-
tion caused by bombing’ by modernist planners and their supporters
(2010, 30). Another shot envisions London’s urban pastoral potential.
Here, two men dig into the dirt of a large cleared lot, a pocket of farm-
land in the shadow of St Paul’s. Reconstruction had been discussed
throughout the war with ideas circulated through, among others, the
Architectural Review, Picture Post, and the BBC radio series Making
Plans. Documentary films also intervene in these debates through their
excavations of wartime London and constructions of overlapping visions
of the city. Post-war campaigns to inform audiences about the changes to
London and other cities picked up on the 1930s effort to reimagine the
spaces associated with urban life, a process that had been a crucial part
of wartime documentaries’ campaign to construct urban geographies of
adaptability, enterprise, and imagination.
Conclusion
Documentary films excavate the damaged city to find evidence to use in
their reconstructions of different aspects of wartime life. In doing so they
reveal how the city was reconstructed by the state in order to mobilise it
for war. While filmmakers shape their material to communicate specific

propaganda messages, they also show how the city itself was shaped by
both government authorities and citizens as reactions to the war. In the
films we see how London was reconstructed as a wartime city. Sandbags
appeared in several places to protect buildings and redirect traffic.
Scaffolding covered part of the Houses of Parliament while other famous
spaces such as the National Gallery hosted cultural activities and became
popular meeting spots. Films show how citizens interacted with and
within these spaces and, while we do not see any signs of dissent, offer
examples of the ways in which people carved out their individual paths
amid the prescribed behaviours. As government-sponsored propaganda
aimed at informing citizens, these films were positioned between the
planners and users of city space, something seen in 1930s films about the
redevelopment of London, post-war films of reconstruction, and more
recent efforts to convince people to accept changes to the city such as
digital projections of the Garden Bridge. Documentary films about the
planning of London provide evidence of proposed material changes and
the strategies that help sell them. They excavate the city’s many layers of
meaning and construct new narratives of urban experience.
References
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From the Docks to Notting Hill: Cinematic
Mappings of Imperial and Post-Imperial
London
Eleni Liarou
It was a Sunday morning in 1949 when Earl Cameron met Paul Robeson
at a Caribbean club in London. Robeson was there to give a talk to an
audience of young black actors. Unsurprisingly, Cameron was impressed:
‘Robeson was a very big name, a very big man, wonderful voice’ (Earl
Cameron, interview with author, September 10, 2009). The two men
had never met before, nor ever met again. For Cameron, Robeson was
an idol. Cameron was then still unknown as an actor, having taken a
few minor roles in theatre. And yet, what connects these two figures is
a historical thread that weaves their careers into a complex tapestry of
Britain’s imperial past and post-imperial ‘hangover’. In their screen roles,
the two actors found themselves inhabiting the same kind of milieu that
represented the complex relationship between race, immigration and
empire. It is the docks in particular that define an important represen-
tational space in their films, historically identified as an entry point and
E. Liarou (*) 
University of London, London, UK
e-mail: e.liarou@bbk.ac.uk

P. Hirsch and C. O'Rourke (eds.), London on Film, Screening Spaces,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64979-5_7
88 E. Liarou
a place where many kinds of ‘goods’ from the empire (not just material,
but also ideological and human) are brought to the metropolis.
Focussing on the careers of Paul Robeson and Earl Cameron, this
chapter examines a selection of films set in London in the mid-twentieth
century. It offers a comparative and textual analysis of the representa-
tional spaces these two very different actors inhabited in their films. This
approach cuts across traditional chronologies of British cinema history to
shed light on dynamic processes of cross-cultural exchange and shifting
definitions of black stardom.
Paul Robeson and the Empire Film

Post-World War II films set in London’s docks, such as Pool of London
(1950) and The Heart Within (1957), put the black migrant experience
on the British screen. But the identification of the docks as a location
for film narratives of race and immigration has deeper roots, reaching
back to early-twentieth-century debates between advocates of free trade
and those proposing protectionist measures. A striking feature of these
debates was the way the opposition to free trade became conflated with
concerns about immigration (generally Jewish or Chinese). This was
reflected in contemporary films, notably The Aliens’ Invasion (1905),
which enacts issues surrounding the passing that year of the Aliens Act
(which attempted to limit Jewish immigration into London’s East End).
As Simon Baker (2014) notes, the film emerged around the same time as
an important speech addressing tariff reform and the dangers of immi-
gration delivered in Limehouse by Joseph Chamberlain. Explicitly or
implicitly, the docks were the locus of this debate, functioning as politi-
cal, economic and racial boundaries. In public discourse, London’s docks
took on troubling associations. Limehouse’s Chinatown, for example,
became synonymous with drug trafficking, sexual scandals and prostitu-
tion (Burrows 2009). Subsequently, London’s docks were established
narratively as a kind of liminal ‘no-man’s land’ between an alien, fluid
world and the solid, unchangeable centre of the imperial metropolis.
The actor who makes this space his own is Paul Robeson. During
the mid-1930s, Robeson’s period of most intensive involvement in the
film industry, the docks almost became his second home: he played a
Mississippi dockworker in the film version of Show Boat (1936) and a
Marseilles dockworker in Big Fella (1937), having already played a simi-
lar role in Stevedore (1935), a stage play about a multiracial dock strike
FROM THE DOCKS TO NOTTING HILL: CINEMATIC MAPPINGS OF IMPERIAL … 89
in America after a black worker was falsely accused of rape. Stevedore

marked an important breakthrough; as an art critic at the time wrote ‘for
the first time in the theatre Negroes were shown fighting for their rights
and their lives, with white workers joining them in their resistance to a
racist mob’ (quoted in Høgsbjerg 2012, 18).
But Robeson saw the docks as a space that could instigate radi-
cal change well before that; in 1928 he took up the role of a stevedore
(Joe) in the London production of Show Boat. His singing of ‘Ol’ Man
River’ contrasted the struggles and sufferings of African–Americans
with the endless, uncaring flow of the Mississippi River. This role made
Robeson an international star and one of the most vocal advocates of the
civil rights movement. In the film version of the play, Robeson sings his
song sitting by the docks, while images of him and other black workers
are shown to be subjected to hard physical labour, vividly evoking the
historic injustices black workers had suffered. Robeson is eventually sur-
rounded by the workers who joyfully join him in the song. His image as
a figure that can unify the poor and underprivileged recurs in his work,
particularly in Song of Freedom (1936) and The Proud Valley (1940). Song
of Freedom was Robeson’s only film set in London’s docks. Robeson
noted that the film was the first step in his effort ‘to break down the
prejudice that somehow Negroes must always be “different” on the
screen’ (Noble 1948, 117). Indeed, the film is a departure from his pre-
vious work because he managed to retain creative control, including final
cut, over the film. After the much-criticised Sanders of the River (1935),
this was a significant victory for Robeson, facilitated by the fact that Song
of Freedom was made by Hammer Productions, a newly founded, small
company at the time. The director J. Elder Wills worked with Robeson
in a similar role in Big Fella. What the two films have in common is the
depiction of a moving, loving relationship of a black couple, in both
cases played by Robeson and Elizabeth Welch (John Zinga and Ruth in
Song of Freedom, and Joe and Manda in Big Fella). This was unprece-
dented in a period in which, as Stephen Bourne argues, ‘American films
portrayed black couples as asexual, comical, childlike servants’ (2014).
Where the two films differ is in the main character’s relationship with
his physical environment and his community. This is not a question of
how realistic the films are (both are filmed in the studio) but of their nar-
rative focus and characterisation. For example, John Zinga has a strong
desire to visit his ancestral home in Africa to find his people; yet, he and
his wife are shown to have integrated into London’s dock community.
90 E. Liarou
He works, eats, drinks and jokes with his fellow workers and friends, hav-
ing formed close bonds with the places he inhabits (the pub, the dock-
yard) and the people he knows. Robeson’s character in Big Fella, Joe,
does not seem to have such an organic relationship with the place and
its people. He is an African–American expatriate who mostly enjoys sing-
ing and drinking at a local restaurant. The police trust him enough to
ask for his help in their investigation of the disappearance of an English
boy of wealthy parents. He seems to have gained their trust because of
his good-natured character and the fact that he is supposed to know the
local underworld of lowlifes and layabouts. And yet, there is little evi-
dence that he knows his local community. He is not shown to work, and
only by chance finds the missing boy, Gerald.
Despite the flaws of these films—mostly in portraying black charac-
ters as childlike and on the margins of society—Robeson inflected the
places he inhabited in films with a new cultural meaning of being eth-
nically diverse, open, united and unifying. Song of Freedom exemplifies
this; his singing in the local pub is not just a musical interlude but an
integral part of the film’s diegesis. His songs, acting as a strong symbol
of comradeship, help bring together a working-class and racially diverse
community (see Fig. 1). As Charles Musser points out, these scenes con-
trasted with the racial hostilities a lot of black communities then living in
Britain’s port cities experienced, and so the pub functions as an idealised
Fig. 1 A unifying figure. Paul Robeson in Song of Freedom (1936)

space, having more in common with London’s Harlem-style nightclubs

where racial interactions were common and with which Robeson was
more familiar (Musser 2011, 270).
Robeson’s films contrast markedly with films with an imperial theme,
such as adaptations of Kipling’s stories (The Elephant Boy, 1937; Gunga
Din, 1939; The Jungle Book, 1942), which were very popular with British
audiences, particularly in port communities. As Brad Beaven notes, ‘the
popularity of films depicting the empire in a positive light has led his-
torians to argue that the 1930s saw a new era in cinema propaganda in
which working-class audiences developed a renewed affection for empire
that had been tainted by the horrors of the First World War’ (2012,
194). In other cases, port communities helped resource empire films.
For example, even before World War I, many black seamen settled in the
streets around the ‘sailor town’ area of Victoria Dock Road, which ran
west to east from Canning Town to Custom House in London. These
areas functioned as ‘pools’ for recruiting black people as film extras in a
number of films about the empire such as Sanders of the River and King
Solomon’s Mines. The Coloured Men’s Institute in that area provided a
meeting place for black seamen, and was where film companies would
often go to recruit extras (Bourne 2001, 38–39).
Robeson appreciated the cultural and racial richness and dynamism
of ports, defined by the constant movement of people and mixture of
cultures. He noted that he ‘discovered’ Africa, ‘the land of our fathers’,
in England in the 1920s, through his encounters with African students
and their political activities, and also from getting to know the seamen in
the ports of London, Liverpool and Cardiff; ‘they too had their organi-
sations, and much to teach me of their lives and their various peoples,’
wrote Robeson in 1953 (1978, 351). Seen in this light, Robeson’s fic-
tional residence in the docks exemplified his efforts to use the power of
culture (music, film, theatre) to effect social change.
‘Keeping the Empire at Bay’: Earl Cameron and the Social

Problem Film
In 1950s British cinema, the London docks were still the favoured
location for representations of black communities, before these moved
from the peripheries to the centre of the British capital at the end
of the decade. Earl Cameron, a new actor from Bermuda, had a lead-
ing role in most British films and television programmes with a racial
92 E. Liarou
theme in the 1950s. Compared to Paul Robeson and his heroic persona,
Cameron personified the ‘noble outsider’ who acted out Britain’s post-
imperial anxieties and dilemmas. Similarly, the grandiosity of the empire
films and naval epics of the 1930s gave way to the more critical genre
of the social problem film. Combining the crime genre conventions, a
‘colour problem’ storyline and the documentary aesthetic of location
photography, the social problem film exhibits the tension between a lib-
eral impulse to acknowledge an increasingly multicultural Britain and an
uneasiness about putting it on the screen.
Earl Cameron himself was very much part of this new context. His
story is somewhat different to that of the 492 passengers on the SS
Empire Windrush which docked at Tilbury in 1948 and became a symbol
of immigration from the Caribbean. He unintentionally came to England
in 1939, while working on a ship en route to South America. When
the war started, he was told that all British subjects on the ship had to
go to London (interview with author, September 10, 2009; Guha and
Brunsdon 2009, 124). However, what he and other colonial migrants
coming to London had in common was that, as British subjects, they had
every right to live and work in Britain, formally recognised in the 1948
British Nationality Act.
The social and cultural impact of this change took longer to be rec-
ognised though; as Bill Schwarz has put it, ‘with immigration the colo-
nial frontier came “home” and when this happened, the language of the
colonies was reworked and came with it’ (1996, 73). In 1950s film, this
meant that Cameron was often cast in roles that marginalised the black
migrant socially and spatially: in the films discussed here, his characters
are situated in the city’s docks, being transitory figures and cut off from
the rest of society.
In his first film role, in Ealing’s Pool of London, Cameron plays a
Jamaican merchant seaman. He and his American fellow worker Dan
(Bonar Colleano) are unwittingly involved in a large-scale theft of dia-
monds. The story spans two days when the ship is docked in the Pool
of London and the two seamen go ashore for a weekend’s leave. From
the start, it is clear that there is nothing to connect Johnny to the city
of London. He goes ashore only because he has nothing else to do. The
symbolic distance between him and the city of London is invoked in a
short sequence of Johnny and the captain as they look at the city from
the ship. The captain’s comment that the city looks like ‘a jewel from
afar’, but ‘up close you find filth and squalor’ echoes the post-imperial
experience of Britain’s colonial immigrants, and anticipates Johnny’s sub-

jection to racial and other abuse. His first disappointment, though, is of a
different kind; he is disillusioned when he realises the hopelessness of his
love for an English woman, Pat (Susan Shaw).
Shaw was ‘the screen’s typical London girl, the personification of the
working girl to be found in any part of the metropolis—in offices, cafes,
shops’ (Pool of London Pressbook 1950). Her locale-specific film per-
sona reinforces Johnny’s identity as a ‘stranger’ in the city of London.
Pat offers to take Johnny on a sightseeing tour of London, providing
motivation for most of the film’s location photography. Keen to film
‘London’s busy river and docks, its teeming streets, historic buildings
and its great humanity,’ Michael Balcon, the film’s producer, wanted to
‘root’ the city and its people in its historical and contemporary great-
ness (Pool of London Pressbook 1950). And yet Johnny is a rootless
figure, being imported into the city but not part of it. Johnny and Pat
visit the National Maritime Museum and as they go around admiring the
exhibits we get a chance to hear their view of the city:
JOHNNY: T hat place used to be lonely before. It’s the first time I’ve
been to London and not glad to get back to sea. It always
seemed before to be such a big, lonesome sort of place.
PAT: Not when you get to know it and make a few friends. It’s
the same as anywhere then.
JOHNNY: You have lots of friends…
Despite Pat’s friendly company, Johnny’s loneliness and awkward

position still dominates the scene. The location itself is also charged with
symbolic meaning; the National Maritime Museum represents Britain’s
naval heritage, its imperial domination at sea and across the world. Earl
Cameron is himself part of this history; when he came to England, he
joined the Merchant Navy to contribute to the war effort. And yet, in
this role as a merchant seaman and a colonial subject, he is portrayed as
an outsider to the making of his history.
The film also portrays a world located between the Pool and tourist
London which is associated with criminality and violence. This includes,
for example, the local dive, where Johnny gets involved in a fight because
he has been robbed and racially abused. After he is thrown out into the
street, a close-up of his face in the gutter accompanies the words of his
white aggressors that ‘they’re all the same’. Johnny’s aggressiveness
94 E. Liarou
is justified but he is still associated with violent behaviour and with

London’s ‘river underworld’, in the words of the film’s promotional slo-
gan (quoted in Wilson 1982, 22).
Apart from this rather contrived scene of violence, Johnny is depicted
in a sympathetic light—‘an understandable individual’, whose ‘dig-
nity, good looks and restraint are further assets’, as one critic described
him (Today’s Cinema 1951, 9). These ‘assets’, however, prevent him
from acting in an independent manner. His white fellow-sailor Dan’s
overconfident and exuberant character only exposes Johnny’s submis-
siveness and lack of self-determination. On various occasions when
Johnny is confronted with white prejudice, it is Dan who defends him.
As Charlotte Brunsdon points out, ‘there is a topography of race within
the film in which Johnny’s mobility is dependent on white compan-
ions.’ Brunsdon adds that this restriction of Johnny was a feature of the
advertising of the film too, which included ‘no image of Cameron, most
focusing on Colleano and Shaw, and suggesting that in film exhibition a
“coloured” actor could not even go out in white company’ (2007, 192).
Continuing the narrative theme and structure of Pool of London,
Jon Penington and David Eady’s The Heart Within (1957) is another
social problem film set in London’s docks. Like Pool of London, the film
interweaves crime genre conventions, a ‘colour problem’ storyline and
documentary-style location photography. Once again, Earl Cameron’s
character, Victor, is a decent but misunderstood outsider. This time,
the theme of an interracial relationship is replaced with a much less
controversial storyline of a romance between two West Indians. Victor,
a dockside worker, looks forward to the arrival of his girlfriend Violet
(Gloria Simpson) who is coming from Trinidad to visit him. When his
spiv compatriot Joe Martell (Dan Jackson) finds out, he boasts that he
will take her away from Victor. The fight that ensues between them will
later, when Joe is found murdered at the wharf, be used as incriminat-
ing evidence against Victor. Joe is killed by Mathew Johnson (Clifford
Evans), the local pawnbroker, a committee member of the Caribbean
Centre but also the overseer of a drug-smuggling racket in which Joe
was involved. Although Victor is innocent, he runs away from the police
in panic. Hiding in an old loft, he is found by paperboy Danny (played
by a fifteen-year-old David Hemmings), who takes pity on the scared and
worn-out man and offers to help him.
The basic outline of The Heart Within resembles that of Big Fella,
in which Joe (Paul Robeson), a dockside worker, befriends a run-away
white boy. As in The Heart Within, an affectionate relationship is devel-

oped between a white child and a black man. Ian Christie notes that
the plotline in Big Fella is the same story that Charlie Chaplin devel-
oped for The Kid (1920) which ‘went on being a template that could
be used to create a plausible link between an “outsider” figure form-
ing a bond with somebody who’s an “insider”’(Christie 2007). The
employment of the same motif in The Heart Within shows how post-war
British cinema turned to old and tried narrative strategies in its attempt
to represent new and socially sensitive issues. Similarly, James Hayter is,
in both films, cast to play someone who is supportive and friendly to
‘outsiders’—in Big Fella, he is one of Joe’s mates (Chuck); in The Heart
Within, he is Danny’s grandfather, who trusts the black fugitive and
helps him.
Although both Pool of London and The Heart Within locate black peo-
ple on the peripheries of London, the latter marks a significant change
in the way they are represented. Unlike Johnny, Victor is not a transient
figure; he is a member of the Caribbean Centre and wants to settle in
London. And yet, the milieu he inhabits only serves to marginalise him.
What dominates the scene is, as summarised by a critic, ‘backgrounds of
bombed areas, poor quarters and [a] local charity club for coloured folk’
(Today’s Cinema 1957, 6). For most of the film Victor is on the run,
identified not with a ‘home’ but with the grubby locations of a semi-
derelict dockland (see Fig. 2). His hideaway, an old, deserted loft, cor-
responds with his own alienation from a society he cannot trust. He is
very wary about letting Danny help him, telling him that ‘when I first
came to this country I trusted everybody. Now I don’t make so many
mistakes.’
The antagonistic relationship between the two compatriots, Victor
Conway and Joe Martell, represents an unusual departure from the
period’s dominant image of an undifferentiated West Indian commu-
nity. Joe is a rogue in search of easy money; Victor is a conscientious,
hard-working man. Both, though, are victims of white prejudice (vividly
expressed in a policeman’s words: ‘if I had my way, I’d send the lot of
them packin’’), which, in turn, justifies Victor’s belief that ‘a coloured
man is guilty until he’s proved innocent.’ It is thanks to the generous
help of white men (Danny and his grandfather) that Victor manages to
prove his innocence. Like Pool of London’s Johnny, Victor is essentially
dependent on the good will of ‘white hands’, in keeping with the pater-
nalism of a Britain still shedding its empire.
96 E. Liarou
Fig. 2 A misunderstood outsider. Earl Cameron in The Heart Within (1957)
The junkyard Danny’s grandfather owns is part of the area’s physi-

cal geography, while also serving as a commentary on black identity.
Danny’s grandfather warns Victor that he will ‘finish up in a junkyard’
if he is not realistic about his expectations of his new life in London.
Victor’s reaction that ‘a junkyard is not that bad’ indicates his passive
acceptance of his position within the dilapidated areas of the docks.
Similarly, when the Police Inspector discusses with Danny’s grandfather
the question of the increasing crime rate in the area since the arrival of
black migrants, the Inspector’s comment that ‘we are in the same busi-
ness’—namely, junk—undermines the film’s liberal impulses, confining,
once again, the black experience to London’s underworld.
However, music in The Heart Within has a more double-edged effect.
Set in ‘London’s dockside calypso quarter’, as a critic put it, the film fea-
tures the ‘Kings of the Caribbean’ calypso band (Kinematograph Weekly
1957, 16). This was a sound commercial choice given the popularity of
such music at the time. Calypso was the first popular music transported
from the Caribbean; Bill Schwarz has argued that the movement of ver-
nacular music from the Caribbean to Britain—calypso, ska, blues—repre-
sented ‘the gradual, uneven creolisation of the metropolis, in which the
cultural forms of the periphery moved to, and subsequently transformed,
the centre’ (2003, 272). The film’s use of calypso music may be an early
example of this spatial process of cultural exchange, but the narrative
contains it within ‘London’s calypso quarter’.
If, as Jonathan Schneer has argued, ‘London’s docks were where the
empire both ended and began, they were its safe edge and a crossroads
of people, things and attitudes’, then Pool of London and The Heart
Within tried to keep the empire ‘at bay’ and placed black characters at
the peripheries of the British metropolis, from where they could be safely
guarded (1999, 39).
The Notting Hill Riots and a Change of Paradigm

The 1958 race riots in Nottingham and Notting Hill marked a turning
point in the history of race relations in Britain, and the release of the film
Sapphire in 1959 would, for the first time, make visible the impact of
black immigration right in the centre of Britain’s post-imperial metropo-
lis. Sapphire was inspired by the riots, and its producers spent a lot of time
visiting the Notting Hill trouble spots in their attempt to make a film
about ‘the growing colour problem in London’ (Daily Express 1958, 9).
Sapphire resembles Pool of London and The Heart Within in its inter-
mingling of the crime film conventions, a documentary aesthetic and
social realism. Yet it is much denser and more emphatic in its treatment
of the ‘colour problem’; it raises a number of issues regarding racial
prejudice and white responses to black immigration, such as those of
miscegenation, ‘passing for white’ and the ‘colour-class’ complex, class
differences within the black community, as well as the housing bar on
black tenants.
The plot revolves around the murder of a music student, Sapphire
(Yvonne Buckingham), whose body is found on Hampstead Heath.
Investigation into the murder leads the two Scotland Yard officers,
Detective Superintendent Hazard (Nigel Patrick) and Detective Inspector
Learoyd (Michael Craig), into London’s black population. Although she
passed for white, Sapphire was mixed-race. The list of suspects includes
her dark-skinned brother, Dr. Robbins (Earl Cameron), the English
98 E. Liarou
father of her unborn child, David Harris (Paul Massie), and his father
Ted Harris (Bernard Miles). Sapphire’s black ex-boyfriend, Johnny
Fiddle (Harry Baird) is also one of the suspects but, finally, David’s sister,
Mildred (Yvonne Mitchell), an unhappily married housewife, is revealed
as the murderer. This is the film that made Cameron widely known; his
role was, once again, that of a respectable, dignified black man.
The extensive academic literature on Sapphire has explored the ways in
which its depiction of black culture and black sexuality is bound up with
questions of female sexual repression and metaphors of the nation as a
white domestic sanctuary under threat (Hill 1986, 83–89; Pines 1991, 3;
Landy 1991, 476–478: Young 1996, 92–113: Webster 2005, 166–170).
The focus here is on how the film’s ‘topicality’ and location shooting
reveal the new challenges of representing the black experience in British
cinema.
Sapphire’s location schedule includes half a dozen authentic set-
tings and reads like a travelogue of London: the West End, Kensington,
Hampstead Heath and the Royal Academy of Music. This is not just a
series of arbitrarily chosen places. The film’s investigative structure deter-
mines these spatial choices, and all of them provide commentary on vari-
ous aspects of the life of London’s black communities. The police car
shuttles between the Brixton terraces and North London; as the two
policemen trace Sapphire’s life back into the ‘black’ world of London,
the camera follows them while they meet landladies in Earl’s Court. The
embargo on black tenants is vividly expressed by Sapphire’s landlady,
who evicted Sapphire when she found out her mixed-race identity. Other
landladies explain to the policemen: ‘I keep a white house, superinten-
dent. I have my living to think of, you understand?’, echoing accommo-
dation notice boards at the time that announced ‘No coloureds’.
Location shooting stirred a wave of opposition to filming in Notting
Hill. G.H. Elvin, secretary of the Association of Cinematograph,
Television and Allied Technicians, called the decision to shoot in the area
‘tactless’. ‘There was,’ he said, ‘no need for it either, since films these
days were often made in one place though they were supposed to be tak-
ing place in another.’ His union would object to anything likely to make
the recent trouble start all over again. They would welcome the script
if it were ‘objectively done and helped people understand the prob-
lem’. John Behr, publicity manager at Pinewood Studios, said that he
thought there was no likelihood whatsoever that the film would excite
further trouble. He believed that there would be no ‘vast crowd scenes’.
He added though that if they did not shoot a film in the real location
they would get hundreds of letters from people complaining of decep-
tion (The Times 1958a, 3). One month later, the Rank Organisation
announced that they would not be shooting any scenes in the Notting
Hill Gate area when they began to make the film. The producer,
Michael Relph, said that it had never been the intention to shoot any
of the scenes of violence in the area nor to use Notting Hill Gate in the
film (The Times 1958b, 12).
As well as underlining how socially divisive the riots were, the con-
troversy over location shooting also reveals the city’s internal frontiers.
This was the first time that British cinema acknowledged the presence
and impact of black immigration on various parts of the metropolis, and
not just its ‘peripheries’. Black people are, however, mostly represented
in places where they drink, dance and gamble. Unlike in the films dis-
cussed above, music and dance in Sapphire are used as cultural mark-
ers of difference that divide rather than unite communities. There is a
poignant sequence when the investigation leads the two policemen to
the Tulip’s Club, a jazz dive where black gangs meet. The owner of the
club, where Sapphire had danced, tells the policeman that anyone could
tell that Sapphire was mixed-race because of the way she danced once
she heard the ‘beat of the bongo’, while the camera’s focus on the sen-
sual dance of mixed-race women links music to promiscuity and black
sexuality. Carrie Tarr argues that this structure of space sets up a con-
trast between the black and white communities mediated by the neutral
territory of the police investigation (1985, 53). White communities are
linked predominantly to the student-oriented settings of college, coffee
bar, and the English home and family. In other words, the film’s topog-
raphy takes on a character of its own, erecting racial boundaries within
London’s neighbourhoods.
Epilogue
If Robeson made a significant step in ‘decolonising’ the docks as a rep-
resentational space that could unite and effect radical change, post-war
cinema kept the lonesome black figure at the peripheries of the British
metropolis, at a time when increasing numbers of black communities
were settling within British urban centres. It was only at the end of the
decade with Sapphire that British cinema confronted the question of the
impact of black immigration right in the heart of the capital.
100 E. Liarou
Robeson’s towering stature and his formidable charisma make him

seem distant, almost mythical—perhaps befitting a time when many in
the audience might never encounter a black man in real life. By con-
trast, Cameron’s more down-to-earth persona, naturalistic performance
style and less imposing physicality made him the right actor for a new
multicultural era, when the black presence was increasingly a part of
everyday British life. Where Robeson’s characters are invariably itiner-
ant, Cameron’s have communities and domestic lives, even professional
careers. Robeson himself was destined to move on; Cameron, like thou-
sands of other post-war migrants, was here to stay.
References
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http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/1187031/index.html. Accessed 5
Jan 2017.
Beaven, Brad. 2012. Going to the Cinema: Mass Commercial Leisure and
Working-Class Cultures in 1930s Britain. In Leisure and Conflict in
Twentieth-Century Britain, ed. Brett Bebber, 63–83. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Bourne, Stephen. 2014. Big Fella (1937). BFI Screenonline. http://www.
screenonline.org.uk/film/id/501396/index.html. Accessed 7 Jan 2017.
———. 2001. Black in the British Frame: The Black Experience in British Film
and Television. London and New York: Continuum.
Brunsdon, Charlotte. 2007. London in Cinema. The Cinematic City since 1945.
London: BFI.
Burrows, Jon. 2009. ‘A Vague Chinese Quarter Elsewhere’: Limehouse in the
Cinema 1914–36. Journal of British Cinema and Television 6 (2): 282–301.
Christie, Ian. 2007. True Pioneer: The British Films of Paul Robeson. In Paul
Robeson: Portraits of the Artist. Pamphlet Accompanying DVD. Criterion
Collection.
Daily Express [author not indicated]. 1958. Rank Cash for Film about Race
Riots. Daily Express, October 10.
Guha, Malini, and Charlotte Brunsdon. 2009. ‘The Colour of One’s Skin’: Earl
Cameron. Journal of British Cinema and Television 6 (1): 122–133.
Hill, John. 1986. Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema 1956–1963. London: BFI.
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Successful Slave Revolt in History; A Play in Three Acts. Durham: Duke
University Press.
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Landy, Marcia. 1991. British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930–1960. Princeton:
Musser. Charles. 2011. Paul Robeson and the Cinema of Empire. In Empire and
Film, ed. Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe, 261–280. London: BFI and
Palgrave.
Noble, Peter. 1948. The Negro in Films. London: Skelton Robinson.
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(BFI) Special Collections, PBS–41544.
Pines, Jim. 1991. Representation and Blacks in British Cinema. London: BFI
Education Pamphlet.
Robeson, Paul. 1978. Here’s My Story (1953). In Paul Robeson Speaks: Writings,
Speeches, Interviews, 1918–1974, ed. Philip S. Foner, 351–352. London:
Quartet Books.
Schwarz, Bill. 1996. The Only White Man in There: The Re-racialisation of
England 1956–1968. Race & Class 38 (1): 65–78.
———. 2003. Claudia Jones and the West Indian Gazette: Reflections on the
Emergence of Post-colonial Britain. Twentieth Century British History 14 (3):
264–285.
Schneer, Jonathan. 1999. London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis. New Haven:
Yale University Press.
Tarr, Carrie. 1985. Sapphire, Darling and the Permitted Boundaries of Pleasure.
Screen 26 (1): 50–65.
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Times, October 11.
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The Times, November 15.
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London and New York: Routledge.
Wanting More: Gender, Space and Desire
in Darling and Four in the Morning
Rose Hepworth
In 1966, Time printed a now iconic cover image displaying the tagline,
‘London: The Swinging City.’ The cover story declared London to be
a city ‘seized by change, liberated by affluence… In a decade domi-
nated by youth, London has burst into bloom. It swings; it is the scene’
(Time, 15 April, 1966). It was a commanding article reflecting real shifts
towards a vibrant youth culture made powerful by newly acquired afflu-
ence, and, in part, because the image it conjured of London was seized
by the contemporary media and fashion industries, it has since become
fixed in cultural memory.
In his ‘cultural geography’ of London in the sixties, Simon Rycroft
explains the fascination with, and self-conscious image-making of, the
mid-sixties. He describes how, even as the idea of Swinging London
reached fever pitch in the summer following the publication of the Time
article, it did so ‘despite its built-in obsolescence’ and that ‘this Modish
and modernist image was a fleeting moment of myth-making and fashion
design surpassed by the evolution of underground London from 1967
onwards’ (Rycroft 2011, 5).
R. Hepworth (*) 
Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK
e-mail: r.hepworth@gold.ac.uk

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64979-5_8
104 R. Hepworth
In Very Heaven, Sara Maitland writes that, in this decade of social

and cultural change, ‘something very extraordinary happened to the
world then, and particularly to women’ (1988, 3). Not only did a newly
empowered youth culture appear to seize the reins of power, but the
fashion, music and media industries flourished, bringing with them a kind
of glamour that, according to Moya Luckett, had ‘a feminine address,
foregrounding its role in the creation of a new and powerful self’ (2000,
233). The introduction of the pill (albeit only to married women) in
1961 gave women more control over their family planning, and the
advent of cheap travel allowed them to access new freedoms and experi-
ences (Luckett 2000, 234). A new ‘permissive’ society caused social anxi-
eties about youth culture and this gave rise to ‘a preoccupation with the
behaviours of young, single women’ (Fink and Tinkler 2016, 2).
The cinema of the sixties responded to both the new youth culture
and the social anxieties with which it was met. Sue Harper writes that
‘cinema was part of the self-mythologizing tendency of the period, and
celebrated specific aspects of the social transformation’ (2000, 101),
but that it also reinforced traditional gender roles, and that films of the
1960s ‘were more prescriptive towards women than they had been in the
1950s’ (2000, 102). Possibly reflecting the new cultural fascination with
London in the mid-sixties, Rycroft tells us that:
The shift in cinematic focus to the metropolis that occurred around 1965
was accompanied by a related shift in aesthetics and the nature of represen-
tation. We move from the representation of gritty, problematic northern
realism to the representation of dreamlike fantasies played out in front of
a cityscape as stage set in which the key players were the young. (Rycroft
2011, 79)
In this essay, I will compare two films, both released in 1965, but appear-
ing to belong on different sides of this shift. Four in the Morning (1965),
directed by Anthony Simmons, has more in common with ‘gritty north-
ern realism’ and yet is located in London, giving the Thames a central
role. John Schlesinger’s Darling (1965) shows us a London that swings.
Their women protagonists seem to belong to different times and places.
However, by examining how the films show these characters in relation
to the urban and domestic spaces that they inhabit, I will show that there
are similarities in the way the films convey the desires of, and attitudes
to, women.
WANTING MORE: GENDER, SPACE AND DESIRE IN DARLING AND FOUR … 105
The Films
The plot of Darling is ostensibly the self-narrated life story of Diana
Scott given as an interview for Ideal Woman magazine. She recounts
her career as model and It Girl, her relationships, and her marriage to
an Italian prince. Diana’s voiceover shows her to be an unreliable narra-
tor. She either wilfully misrepresents her sometimes questionable actions
or she has genuinely fallen for the version of herself that she and the
(male) image-makers around her have produced: the ‘Happiness Girl’ of
high profile advertising campaigns, the beautiful, socially mobile ‘Ideal
Woman’, the princess. The Diana the audience sees is in contrast to this
(self-) fabricated image.
Diana is, without doubt, selfish, ambitious, and hedonistic. Katherine
Shonfield describes her as an ‘amoral woman’ who ‘wreaks havoc and
destruction on all around her’ (2000, 101). For Shonfield, the charac-
ter of Diana is central to a ‘profoundly misogynistic film’ (2000, 101).
Carrie Tarr points to the film’s ‘need to appropriate and contain the
threat of female sexual autonomy’ and its ‘reactionary message that per-
missiveness, however momentarily pleasurable will be punished’ (1985,
64). Tarr claims that this message was a response to contextual social
anxieties about the ‘permissive society’, particularly the permissiveness
of women. Sue Harper disagrees: ‘Rather, Diana evokes a version of the
Eternal-Feminine (instinctive, illogical) which the film-makers find irri-
tating, and which the exasperated males in the text can never accommo-
date’ (2000, 111).
Whether Darling condemns Diana for her amorality, her sexual
autonomy, or for what the film sees as being inherent characteristics of
the feminine, the condemnation does not feel entirely complete. Despite
presenting Diana as ‘fickle, vain, affected, bitchy, superficial, callous,
deceitful, greedy, and self-interested’ (Tarr 1985, 59), these characteris-
tics can also be read as tools necessary for survival (or at least for success)
in a city that is depicted as being all of those things. In my view, part of
the reason that the film seems ‘unsure of its moral values, fascinated by
what it sets out to condemn’ (Tarr 1985, 59), is that it seems unable to
completely conceal its reluctant admiration for this woman who, for a
time, thrives in the new ‘Swinging’ London.
Robert Murphy notes that whilst Diana is undoubtedly manipulative,
selfish and ambitious, she is ‘by no means as inhuman and unscrupulous
as many of the people who surround her’ and that, rather, ‘her restless,
106 R. Hepworth
spontaneous character seems infinitely preferable to the bored, petty-

minded conservatism of her parents’ (1997, 124). This supports a more
sympathetic reading of Diana in which her actions are those of a charac-
ter perpetually dissatisfied with her lot, and dazzled by the possibilities
for the future promised by a society in which the old currencies of class
and intellect are devalued.
The actor who played Diana, Julie Christie, evaluated Diana’s charac-
ter in relation to contemporaneous women protagonists and values:
Here was a woman who didn’t want to get married, didn’t want to have
children like those other kitchen-sink heroines; no, Darling wanted to have
everything. Of course at the time, this was seen as greedy promiscuity and
she had to be punished for it. But there was an element of possibility for
women, of a new way of living, which is why the film was such a success.
(Christie 1988, 171)
Viewed in this way, Diana’s ‘greedy promiscuity’ is not about her being
fickle or superficial. Nor is it even particularly about her attaining a spe-
cific personal or professional ambition. Rather, it is about desperately
putting distance between herself and a life in which her freedoms would
be limited by a husband and children.
If Darling suggests the possibility of a new way of living for women in
London’s ‘Swinging Sixties’, Four in the Morning shows that this possi-
bility remained elusive for many. In his book, Swinging City: A Cultural
Geography of London 1950–1974, Simon Rycroft notes that:
The image of a suddenly frivolous city in which old money and new money
mixed freely and in which the old barriers to social mobility had lifted of
course struck many as an exaggeration. (Rycroft 2011, 69)
During the process of editing Very Heaven, Sara Maitland repeatedly

came across this sense that the Swinging Sixties did not happen uni-
formly. She describes encountering ‘the conviction that wherever you
were and whatever you were doing, the “real” sixties were somewhere
else; probably ... [in a] different city, different street, different psyche’
(1988, 11). For the three women characters in Anthony Simmons’s film,
4am is a brief interstice between night and the start of the working day,
and can be read as symbolising the dawning of social change that is not
yet within reach.
Set along the Thames, the film introduces us to a nameless woman

whose stiffened corpse is pulled from the river. Like her identity, her story
is unknown. She is dressed in a plain, light-coloured trench coat. Wife
(Judi Dench) is a new mother whose teething baby won’t stop crying and
whose husband returns home drunk and in the company of his friend. She
is exhausted, depressed, and frustrated with her lack of freedom.
The third woman is a nightclub singer finishing her shift and meet-
ing a man she knows. They walk together by the river before taking a
speedboat eastward up the Thames. Returning by a variety of transport
methods, she goes home and he goes to the office to begin a normal day.
Along their journey, an entire relationship seems to play out before they
part, disappointed in each other, and reminded of their own shortcom-
ings. All three women wear the same light-coloured trench coat remind-
ing us that the corpse is an Everywoman, a depressing reminder that
women who reject the role society has allotted them risk being punished.
Moving on to a closer reading of these films, I want to tease out the
ways the relationships of these protagonists to their London environ-
ments signify a pivotal point in the much celebrated and so-called social
revolution of the sixties. This analysis will highlight the way these films
reinforce traditional gender roles but also how they complicate their
characters’ relationships to spaces with traditional gender associations in
order to present, cinematically, the changing aspirations and expectations
of women. I shall begin by looking at how Darling promotes and frus-
trates its protagonist’s agency through its use of space. I shall then turn
to Four in the Morning by way of balancing this representation of mid-
1960s female agency.
Darling, the Swinging Subject, and the City

Simon Rycroft notes that part of the power of the Time article of 1966
was its contribution of the ‘swinging subject’ but that the article reflected
the emergence of this subject from other media forms (2011, 71).
The swinging subject was partially created by the films that depicted
it. Moya Luckett claims that ‘the narrative of these films heralded a new
feminine perspective marked by the importance of sexual expression to
self-identity’ and that London had a ‘structural role in enabling and
authorising this glamour and agency’ (2000, 233). Part of this self-iden-
tity and sexual expression is formed in relation to the city and how the
swinging subject inhabits the city.
108 R. Hepworth
Darling presents Diana as a subject produced by the city and who, in

turn, embodies that city. The opening shot is a close-up of a billboard on
which an image of a starving child is being casually covered with a new
image: that of Diana’s face advertising her own story for Ideal Woman
magazine. This is a non-too subtle introduction to the film’s repeated
criticism of the superficiality of London society, but it also shows us that
our heroine is a product of this superficial preoccupation with image
and advertising. A worker assembles Diana’s face on the city billboard,
just as other men in the film will later contribute to the production of
her image (Robert, Miles, and her photographer friend Malcolm). This
piecemeal construction of the billboard image is appropriate for a char-
acter who has been described as ‘a composite figure whose component
parts do not entirely fit’ (Tynan 1965, 24). Once the picture has been
assembled, the camera shows extreme close-ups of the finished product
so that we still only see portions of Diana’s face: a single made-up eye
or her lips which, perhaps unwittingly, appear to have been ‘sealed’ by
text crediting the film’s producer, Janni, and its director, Schlesinger,
who are of course ultimately responsible for the filmic production of
the images of both Diana, and of Julie Christie. This opening sequence
shows the ordinary operational processes of the city producing the image
of Diana, the Darling girl, who, in turn, comes to represent the allure of
the swinging city.
Having established this symbolic twinning of Diana with the city
itself, the camera follows a 20-year-old Diana down the street and past
several billboards. This again aligns Diana with the streets of the city, and
places both in relationship to the superficiality, materialism and commod-
ification of the advertising industry. At this point in her story, Diana is
a part of the target market of the advertising industry, rather than part
of its image-making as is the case in the film’s present day. The camera
shows Diana to be at ease in the city. Her head is upturned, taking in
the sights of London, and she literally swings her handbag as she walks.
Her present-day voiceover pokes fun at this younger version of herself: ‘I
don’t know what I was wearing,’ she says. ‘Terribly Chelsea, I thought I
was.’ In conjunction with the on-screen image, this voiceover reinforces
the association of the swinging subject with the city.
Moments later, Diana is invited to take part in a televised interview
outside the V&A. Robert (Dirk Bogarde) asks her about her views on
fashion and convention. The juxtaposition of old London (represented
by the V&A) and the ‘new’ London that Diana embodies would later
become a feature of the Time article published the year after the film’s
release. The camera assumes the perspective of the camera-operator. This
has the effect of framing Diana as the subject of a documentary. She
becomes an exemplary member of London’s society.
We then see this image multiplied six times. At first this seems like a
split screen effect but in fact the camera has moved from city street to
cutting room, where Diana’s image is being shown on six screens simul-
taneously. The framing and mediation of the subject illustrates the fine
separation of perspectives between the documentary camera and the
camera used to produce the advertisements of which we have already
seen so much. It also takes this image-making off the streets where it
is consumed by the public and highlights the production process. The
production team appraise the images they have created, and we see them
watching Diana in such a way that our gaze is channelled through theirs.
The female image is to be appropriated through the masculinist media
machinery, and the association with London is reinforced by Robert’s
segue into the next section of his piece. He asks, ‘How conventional
are we in matters of taste? The London skyline is constantly altering.’
The city, which had undergone extensive redevelopment in the post-war
years, is again twinned with its changing inhabitants.
Diana is shown to be comfortable in the city streets and public places.
She goes to parties and private views and occupies the streets carelessly.
Whether she is swinging her handbag or racing around Trafalgar Square
in Miles’s open-top car (see Fig. 1), she finds liberation in her fearless
occupation and enjoyment of these city spaces. She feels a sense of enti-
tlement in these spaces. As she parks her car around the corner from
Miles’s apartment, we see her beat an older male ‘establishment’ figure
to a parking space on Wimpole Street. She ignores his instruction to ‘Go
on, get out of it’ and his complaint about ‘women drivers’ and smiles to
herself as she pops a coin into the meter. She quite literally takes his place
in this new London and it is clear that she does not question her right to
do so. As Miles and Diana carefully undress, a sudden cut to the park-
ing meter shows it reading ‘Excess Period’ followed by ‘Penalty!’. In her
analysis of Darling, Carrie Tarr reads this as an example of how the film’s
narrative punishes the excess of women’s sexuality (1985, 61). However,
I note that although the narrative does ultimately punish Diana for her
excesses, the city itself seems to indulge them, for when she returns to
the car she finds that she has no parking ticket and the vehicle has not
been towed away.
110 R. Hepworth
Fig. 1 Diana racing around Trafalgar Square in Darling (1965)
Janet Fink and Penny Tinkler have examined how social anxieties
about the sexualities of teenage girls manifested themselves in social
problem films of the era. They point out that, often, the sexual inno-
cence of young women is shown to be at risk when these characters are
‘out of place’:
streets are a recurring visual motif signifying the vulnerability of young

women and range from almost deserted roads wreathed in darkness, to
brightly, even garishly, lit streets. Such lights emphasise also the lure of big
cities and the dangers of modern urban life. (Fink and Tinkler 2016, 6)
Diana is not portrayed as being vulnerable in an urban environment. She

expresses sexual desire openly and her sexuality appears to be a conscious
part of her self-expression. If sexual innocence is equated to the safety of
the home, then the city represents not only the risk of losing innocence
but also developing sexual desire. Unlike the teenage characters in Fink
and Tinkler’s analysis, Diana is not ‘out of place’ in the city. Shonfield
observes that Diana ‘inhabits the city as if she were Baudelairian man.
She is the female counterpart of Alfie’ (Shonfield 2000, 101).1 Certainly,
Diana is more ‘at home’ in its streets than in any of the domestic spaces
we see her in.
Each domestic space in the film represents limitations on her free-

doms, associated as they are with traditional feminine roles of wife and
mother. In Walls Have Feelings, Shonfield’s chapter on the interior spaces
of home and office includes an analysis of the way that Darling disrupts
this traditionally gendered organisation of interior and exterior space.
She points to the scene in Miles’s office and notes how Diana enjoys the
sensual experience of connecting her skin with the deep-pile carpet in the
office, and traces her fingers along the wood panelling (2000, 101–102).
Diana climbs onto a table and it becomes her red carpet, the electric strip
lighting behind her head stands in for an elaborate chandelier. Diana has
made this place her own just as she does the extravagant charity galas,
the art galleries, and the other non-domestic interiors that London has
produced. Her easy inhabitation of space in which she ‘ought’ to be a
stranger is an expression of her sexual agency.
This interior space might resemble home but its resemblances are mis-
leading. For example, what appears to be a shelf of books is actually a
faux-bookshelf concealing a mini-bar, a reminder of the falsities of the
world of image-making and are in contrast to Robert’s books at home
in their domestic space or the ‘rat-trap’ as she calls it tellingly. In another
office (where film executives cast her for a non-speaking part in the film
Jacqueline), a small case of books is revealed to be a cigar box. But the
real books she later flings from their shelf in the heat of her break-up
from Robert. ‘Books!’ she cries. ‘My God, how I hate bloody books!’
This is just one example of her discomfort in the domestic space. At
other times she flops impatiently onto sofas or beds, or paces about like
an animal in a zoo. In Italy, in despair and desperation, she strips off her
clothes and tosses them aside as she runs through the grand house in
which her new husband has abandoned her.
Stasis and Movement in Four in the Morning

Darling presents a London that is fashionable, self-mythologised and
exclusive (albeit with a slightly rotten core), but Four in the Morning
shows a London still in a state of post-war regeneration: its ordinary
characters surrounded by cranes, smoking towers, and images of the
industrial Thames. The river is a space, a character, and a narrative device
and it structures the film, giving it its meandering shape and brooding
tone.
112 R. Hepworth
In World Film Locations: London, Jez Connolly writes that ‘a river

can posses a liminal quality; it is an ambiguous, unclassifiable, transi-
tory space, a marginal state between states, distinctly different from terra
firma’ (2011, 130). These qualities could be applied equally to the time
of 4am, which takes on a spatial rather than simply a temporal quality,
and suggests that what might happen there, however significant, might
simply be washed away with the water, or erased by the feet of London’s
workforce returning to its streets as the day begins.
The audience’s first impressions of the three women protagonists are
shaped by the space in which the camera first presents them to us. They
are not given names (although the characters in Judi Dench’s narrative
thread sometimes refer to each other by the names of the actor who plays
them). No backstory is supplied initially and little more is forthcoming
as the film progresses. We must infer what we can from each woman’s
surroundings. Girl, played by Ann Lynn, is introduced to us at her place
of work, a nightclub. She is dressed up, it is late, there is alcohol in the
venue, and we watch her brief exchanges with men. These elements sig-
nal an identity that is not compatible with the role of wife and mother
as it is traditionally represented, and so she is instantly aligned with its
opposite: the whore. The nightclub is just spatial shorthand for creat-
ing this first impression. When the film cuts to two men examining the
corpse on the shore of the river, they inspect her ring finger first. The
absence of a wedding ring seems to bring the morality of both women
into question because of the juxtaposition of each scene.
Judi Dench’s character, Wife, is framed by doorway after doorway in
her tiny flat. There seems barely enough room for both her and the cam-
era, and the effect is that it is the domestic space that frames her first,
the camera second. When her infant daughter cries, the image of the
cot almost entirely fills the frame. The claustrophobia of the flat, and of
Wife’s domestic responsibilities, is conveyed through the proximity of
the camera to the objects and people that it films. The baby is shown
through the bars of the cot. When Wife shakes the bars of the cot in des-
peration, it is as if she is shaking the bars of a neighbour’s cell. This puts
us in mind of Diana’s ‘rat-trap’ in which she too feels ‘prisoner’. There
is a cut to a shot of two men play-sword fighting on a footbridge. At
four in the morning, while Wife is trapped in the prison of the home, the
streets and outside spaces are literally a playground for her husband.
Husband and his bachelor friend return home. They continue to
drink, inviting Wife to join them. When she refuses, there is a row and
Husband tells his friend that he misses ‘having another human being
around the house’. He criticises Wife’s efforts to earn money of her own
(her attempts to balance family life with some paid work of her own are
signalled by a small desk by the bed and suggests that this is the reason
why she is tired). His sniping is as endless and stifling as the baby’s cries.
In one of the final scenes she says to him, ‘You can get out of these four
walls, you can see your friends, you can go for a drink, you can break
away. I’m not prepared to cook your meals and look after your baby and
just be here whenever you feel like it.’ Wife does attempt to leave, but
she comes back because, in her own words, ‘there was nowhere else to
go’. For Wife, the lifestyle of the Swinging subject is unreachable but
there is a sense of her being—in Julie Christie’s words—‘on the outside
looking in’ (1988, 169–170). She is looking in at people who seem to
have more: more freedom, more choice, more opportunity.
We return to Girl’s place of work where Boy is waiting for her outside.
We learn that most mornings she gets a cab home from work. Later, she
says of her life, ‘You get used to being independent, that’s all.’ She tells
Boy that if she had it her way she would spend her life in taxis and hotel
rooms. She is used to the freedoms of the city afforded to her by having
her own income and, like Diana, she is more comfortable in the transi-
tional spaces of London than domestic spaces. We only see her engaged
in travel through the city, never in the stasis of the domestic sphere.
Moya Luckett asserts that ‘all forms of travel call up specific relation-
ships between self and space’ (2000, 236). Luckett is writing primarily
about tourism, and how the 1960s commodification presented young
girls in particular with new travel opportunities. ‘Promises of unprec-
edented freedom positioned travel as central to the period’s single girl
mythology’ (2000, 234). We see this in Diana’s trips to Paris and Capri.
Girl may not spend her life in the hotels of Europe, but we do see the
freedoms afforded to her by movement and transport, and these map
directly onto her expression of sexual desire.
In a London coffee shop at the start of their riverside journey, Boy
holds her hand. She looks uneasy about the physical intimacy but
declares it is acceptable while there is a table separating them. They walk
and talk for a while, catching a bus westwards along the bank of the
Thames before alighting at Lion Wharf in Isleworth. Here, Boy places
a discarded scrap of machinery between them, pretending it is a table,
before kicking it away violently. She clearly feels threatened. They walk
to the shore where Boy pulls her into moored speedboat. She rejects his
114 R. Hepworth
Fig. 2 A joyride up the Thames in Four in the Morning (1965)
advances but as he releases the boat from its moorings and takes them on
a joyride up the Thames (Fig. 2), she allows him to kiss her. Their kissing
becomes more passionate the further they travel. The exhilaration of the
movement seems to cause her to leave behind her unease and as he tries
to leave the embrace to steer the boat, she pulls him back towards him.
When he stops the boat, her unease returns. From this point on, their
relationship falters. At the end of the film, Boy goes to work and Girl
returns to her room in Hammersmith alone. They have, briefly, in the
liminal space that is 4am, had the freedom of the city but it is over now.
In Four in the Morning, both Girl and Wife are defined by their lack
of what the other has. Despite her freedoms, Girl wants a husband and a
family and is frightened of ‘ending up alone in a bedsitter’. Wife desper-
ately wants some social and financial independence. The film reinforces
traditional distinctions between wife/mother and whore, and it uses
space to restrain its characters within these roles. However, the dissatis-
faction and frustration each woman demonstrates is shown with sympa-
thy, and neither are shown to be comfortable in the spaces they inhabit.
The film seems to suggest that although these women, like many others,
are excluded from the swinging streets of Chelsea and Kensington, they
are nevertheless reaching for new possibilities.
Just as Darling portrays a London as shallow, extravagant and as
amoral as its protagonist, Four in the Morning is brooding, mournful and
depressing. Its mood weighs as heavily over its protagonists as the dawn
mist hangs over the industrial Thames in the opening sequence. Despite
their differences, these films speak to each other across a divide. The fates
of all three women from Four in the Morning await Diana around every
corner.
Considered together, these films speak to the complexities of social
change and its implications for women in the first half of this trans-
formative decade. It is my view that although neither film gives a par-
ticularly optimistic portrayal of women’s prospects in 1960s society,
both sympathise with their women protagonists to some degree and
seek to comment on the falsity of a society that seems to promise free-
dom and choice to women but permits them neither. Sue Harper writes
that although British cinema in the 1960s celebrated and contributed
to some elements of social change, it was also far more conservative in
its treatment of women than much of 1950s British cinema had been,
drawing ‘boundaries between sacred and profane females in an unexpect-
edly rigid way. It judged women either as Keepers of the Flame (safe but
dull), or as Courtesans (willing penetratees, but heartless)’ (2000, 102).
The boundaries between sacred and profane women are re-inscribed in
the relationships between these women protagonists and the London
spaces that they inhabit. At face value, both Darling and Four in the
Morning can be said to reinforce the rigidity of these boundaries. The
sexually promiscuous and apparently heartless Diana is placed in opposi-
tion to Robert’s wronged wife, and a sister who is safe but painfully dull.
Similarly, in Four in the Morning both living women are placed in oppo-
sition to each other. Judi Dench plays a wife and mother and Ann Lynn
plays a nightclub worker who wanders by the river with men. However,
closer readings reveal that, although it doesn’t bring them happiness, the
women protagonists of each film complicate this distinction.
By examining the relationship of these women to the spaces they
occupy and by looking at how they inhabit or move through these
spaces, we can understand that central to both these films is their pro-
tagonist’s desire to have more. Each of these characters wants to broaden
their experience of what it means to be a woman in sixties Britain, and in
all cases society refuses to comply. In these films, London is the site upon
which their desire is both fuelled and frustrated by the real—and the cul-
turally mythologised—elements of mid-1960s social and cultural change.
Note
1. Alfie (1966), directed by Lewis Gilbert, stars Michael Caine as the selfish
and womanising Alfie Pennyworth.
116 R. Hepworth
References
Christie, Julie. 1988. Everybody’s Darling: An Interview with Julie Christie. In
Very Heaven: Looking Back at the 1960s, ed. Sara Maitland, 167–172. London:
Virago.
Connolly, Jez. 2011. Thames Tales: Stories by the Riverside. In World Film
Locations: London, ed. Neil Mitchell, 130–131. Bristol: Intellect.
Fink, Janet, and Penny Tinkler. 2016. Teetering on the Edge: Portraits of
Innocence, Risk and Young Female Sexualities in 1950s’ and 1960s’ British
Cinema. Women’s History Review 26 (1): 2–17. doi:10.1080/09612025.201
5.1123021.
Harper, Sue. 2000. Women in British Cinema: Mad, Bad and Dangerous to
Know. London: Continuum.
Luckett, Moya. 2000. Travel and Mobility: Femininity and National Identity in
Swinging London Films. In British Cinema, Past and Present, eds. Justine
Ashby and Andrew Higson, 233–246. London: Routledge.
Maitland, Sara. 1988. Very Heaven: Looking back at the 1960s. London: Virago.
Murphy, Robert. 1997. Sixties British Cinema. London: BFI.
Rycroft, Simon. 2011. Swinging City: A Cultural Geography of London,
1950–1974. London: Ashgate.
Shonfield, Katherine. 2000. Walls Have Feelings: Architecture, Film and the City.
London: Routledge.
Tarr, Carrie. 1985. Sapphire, Darling and the Boundaries of Permitted Pleasure.
Screen 26 (1): 50–65. doi:10.1093/screen/26.1.50.
Tynan, Kenneth. 1965. Identitkit Girl on the Make. Observer, September 19.
Queer London on Film: Victim (1961),
The Killing of Sister George (1968)
and Nighthawks (1978)
Chris O’Rourke
This chapter explores the cinematic depiction of post-war queer London,

focussing on the portrayal of queer bars and clubs in Victim (1961), The
Killing of Sister George (1968) and Nighthawks (1978). London’s net-
work of queer commercial spaces emerged before World War II. But
representations of these spaces in the media became more prominent in
the 1950s and 1960s, when scandals involving high-profile figures and
debates over the legal status of men who had sex with men generated
new interest in the city’s sexual subcultures. Film responded to this pub-
lic curiosity by dramatising the lives of queer men and women in the
city. It also played a role in shaping an emerging gay and lesbian politi-
cal agenda. During the 1970s, representations of queer London in film
became political talking points, and, by the end of the decade, film was
being used by gay and lesbian activists to critique the city’s existing queer
subcultures based around commercial venues, and to lay claim to broader
visibility in the public sphere.
C. O’Rourke (*) 
University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK
e-mail: corourke@lincoln.ac.uk

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64979-5_9
118 C. O’Rourke
London has a long history of queer sexual subcultures. By the late

nineteenth century, men who were attracted to other men regularly
congregated at various sites across the capital, but especially in the new
commercial spaces of the West End. In an era when sex between men
was illegal, these busy venues offered a degree of anonymity and privacy,
and their proprietors tended to turn a blind eye to the sexual proclivi-
ties of paying customers. As Matt Cook argues, between them, many of
the West End’s theatres, music halls, grand hotels, cafés, pubs and tea
houses acted as ‘an indoor social and sexual network,’ where men were
able to meet and find partners (2003, 26). This network of queer com-
mercial spaces was well known to initiates, and was communicated to
like-minded newcomers to the city by word of mouth and covert sig-
nifiers of sexual difference. To the wider public, however, the existence
of a queer metropolitan subculture remained obscure, surfacing occa-
sionally in news of scandalous cases, such as the arrest of the cross-dress-
ing men Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park (also known as Stella and
Fanny) or the trials of Oscar Wilde. In fact, knowledge of widespread
queer sexual activity in the capital seems to have been actively suppressed
by the police at times, out of a concern that it would give dangerous
ideas to impressionable youth (Upchurch 2000). The Bohemian night-
clubs and bars of interwar London, which were concentrated mainly in
Soho but also in the queer-friendly ‘bedsitter lands’ around Kensington
and Ladbroke Grove, provided new opportunities for men and women
attracted to members of the same sex to socialise (Houlbrook 2002, 36;
Jennings 2006, 208–210). Still, though, there was little public discus-
sion of these men and women during the 1920s and 1930s, and most
of this was limited to court reports and news of sexual scandals. Matt
Houlbrook argues that, before the 1950s, it would have been extremely
difficult for the average member of the public to find evidence of queer
lives in London outside of legal discourse. ‘It was always through the
intermediary figure of the policeman,’ he writes, ‘and in the mediating
space of the courtroom that the press, public, and state encountered
queer urban culture’ (2005, 222).
In the period after World War II, the popular press increased its cover-
age of London’s sexual subcultures. This was partly a response to chang-
ing attitudes towards the value of discussing sex openly. But it was also
prompted by a growing number of arrests for homosexual offences,
including prominent cases involving the actor John Gielgud, the jour-
nalist Peter Wildeblood, and the Soviet spies Guy Burgess and Donald
QUEER LONDON ON FILM: VICTIM (1961) … 119
Maclean (Bingham 2009, 181–188). Emboldened by these cases, more

journalists began to venture into London’s queer bars and clubs, osten-
sibly to offer their readers greater insight, but also to fuel public anxiety
and newspaper sales with sensational headlines about the sordid activities
of deviant men and women (Bengry 2014). The Wolfenden committee,
set up in 1954 to investigate homosexual offences and prostitution, gen-
erated more sustained discussion by journalists and sociologists (Mort
1999; Bingham 2009, 188–191; Houlbrook and Waters 2006). In the
process, popular print culture created increasingly well-defined images of
London’s queer spaces and the people frequenting them, who were now
regularly referred to as ‘homosexuals’ or ‘inverts’.
Filmmakers responded to the public curiosity about the nature and
extent of homosexuality in the capital, drawing on contemporary news
reports, as well as literary and theatrical depictions. As Andy Medhurst
argues, members of the cinema audience who were already part of, or
familiar with, queer culture may have spotted signs of ‘nebulous nancies’
on screen prior to the 1950s (2006). But, by the early 1960s, the British
cinema was beginning to address the subject head on, and in ways that
would help to shape the evolving public discourse on homosexuality in
the years that followed (Buckle 2015, 52–53). Cinematic representations
of homosexuality in this period were not limited to depictions of queer
London. In A Taste of Honey (1961), featuring Murray Melvin as the gay
art student Geoffrey in a central role, the focus is on the northern, work-
ing-class town of Salford. However, given the public attention directed
at London’s queer subculture, it is not surprising that three important
films that took homosexuality as a central subject—Victim, The Killing
of Sister George and Nighthawks—would choose London as their setting.
These films, and their reception, show how the representation of queer
London, and especially its bars, clubs and other venues, became increas-
ingly contested in the 1960s and 1970s, as the city’s post-war sexual sub-
culture was joined by a more politicised gay and lesbian community.
Victim (1961)
The 1961 film Victim, directed by Basil Dearden, was a product of
the post-Wolfenden interest in the legal status of male homosexuals.
According to the film’s producer, Michael Relph, the film was made with
the intention of persuading the public that the best course of action was
to follow the Wolfenden committee’s recommendations for legal reform,
120 C. O’Rourke
and to do away with the current oppressive laws referred to in popular

parlance (including in the film) as a ‘blackmailer’s charter’ (Medhurst
1984, 24). While its intentions were staunchly liberal, the film was poten-
tially radical in its voicing of same-sex desire through the figure of its
popular star, Dirk Bogarde (Medhurst 1984). It also constituted one of
the earliest explicit cinematic representations of London’s queer network,
including scenes set in a fictional commercial venue, the Chequers hotel,
which were filmed in the Salisbury pub on St Martin’s Lane—a real West
End bar, with a significant queer clientele (Coldstream 2011, 42).
The bar is introduced early in the film from the perspective of Jack
‘Boy’ Barrett (Peter McEnery), a young man on the run from the police,
who has been stealing from his employers in order to pay blackmailers.
The blackmailers have evidence that Barrett has been romantically involved
with Bogarde’s character, the barrister Melville Farr. In these early scenes,
Barrett phones Farr from the pub to ask for help and later has a whispered
conversation with his friend Eddy, in which details of his predicament
emerge. Although the setting is the cosmopolitan West End, there are ele-
ments of what Charlotte Brunsdon calls ‘local London’ in the film’s depic-
tion of the Chequers, which is established as a space frequented by a core
group of regulars (2007, 57). But the prevailing tone is less of friendliness,
and more of paranoia. This is created not only through the hushed talk of
an extortion racket, but also by the editorial choice to cut directly from
the bar to the police station, where Barrett’s case is being discussed by the
authorities. The tension is increased in later scenes through the lurking
presence of Mickey and his partner PH—men who, at first, may be mis-
taken for blackmailers, but who are later revealed to be confidence trick-
sters with a line in sending fraudulent begging letters (Fig. 1). Also on the
periphery of these scenes is an unnamed ‘lone wolf’ in a pinstripe suit, who
observes the unfolding dramas and finally propositions Eddy outside the
entrance to the pub. The man’s identity as an undercover police sergeant,
revealed in the film’s last act, confirms the suspicions of Barrett, Eddy and
the bar’s other queer customers that they are under surveillance.
As with the production team’s earlier ‘social problem’ film, Sapphire
(1959), which dealt with the prejudice faced by black Londoners
through the framework of a detective drama, Victim uses many of the
tropes of the crime thriller to tell its story. Andy Medhurst argues that
the use of the thriller genre was a way to make the issue of homosex-
ual law reform palatable to a wider audience (1984, 29). This was also
Fig. 1 Mickey and PH survey the scene at the Chequers bar in Victim (1961)
the verdict of the reviewer for the Kinematograph Weekly, who described
the film as ‘propaganda skilfully clothed in suspenseful “who-dunnit”’
(quoted in Coldstream 2011, 89). But the use of thriller conventions
arguably has the additional effect of reinforcing the longstanding links
between London’s queer spaces and criminality. Here, as in the popular
press, knowledge of queer urban culture is mediated through the fig-
ure of a policeman, albeit one who is largely sympathetic to the plight
of the film’s main characters. Farr’s own status as a representative of law
and order, and his decision to work with the police to put an end to the
blackmail scheme, also makes him an outsider on the queer metropoli-
tan scene. In a similar way to the Rodney Garland novel The Heart in
Exile (1953), in which a respectable psychiatrist delves into London’s
queer ‘underworld’ to investigate the death of his male lover, the film is
careful to present its protagonist as a respectable, middle-class homosex-
ual, rather than a camp queen (Houlbrook and Waters 2006, 144–145).
Nevertheless, Victim’s depiction of paranoia as a defining feature of queer
lives in London during the post-war period struck a chord with some
viewers. John Alcock, who had grown up in the climate of fear associ-
ated with the Wildeblood trial, remembered identifying with Bogarde’s
122 C. O’Rourke
performance: ‘I thought that every policeman coming up to me in the

street was going to arrest me,’ he recalled. ‘I got so frightened that I
burnt all my love letters’ (Hall Carpenter Archives 1989, 52).
The bar scenes in Victim also voice a critique of London’s queer com-
mercial venues that would become more forceful in later years. After
listening to a conversation about Barrett’s suicide in prison, Fred, the
barman at the Chequers, shares his opinion about male homosexuals.
‘They’re good for a laugh, alright,’ he tells actress-turned-model Madge.
‘Very witty at times. Generous, too. I hate their bloody guts! … If they
ever make it legal, they may as well license every other perversion.’
Possibly added to appease the censor’s call for more balance in the film
(Coldstream 2011, 56), Fred’s diatribe also points to the hypocrisy of
proprietors of queer venues, who were willing to pocket the ‘pink shil-
ling’, but who were often indifferent or actively hostile to any extensions
of legal protection to their homosexual customers (Houlbrook 2002, 37;
Bengry 2009).
The Killing of Sister George (1968)

Up to the 1960s, London’s lesbian subculture was much less prominent
in public discourse than the activities of male homosexuals. This began
to change as part of the increasing media focus on homosexuality sur-
rounding the passing of the Sexual Offences Act in 1967, which partially
decriminalised sex between adult men in England and Wales (Bingham
2009, 197). Film contributed to shaping the public discussion on les-
bianism in this period. In particular, the American film The Killing of
Sister George, adapted from a successful stage play by the independent
American producer Robert Aldrich, drew attention to the lesbian subcul-
ture that had grown up around commercial venues in London, and espe-
cially to the Gateways club, which was used as a key location in the film.
The Gateways, on Bramerton Street, off the King’s Road in Chelsea,
opened in the 1930s, and became an important lesbian venue in the
post-war years (Gardiner 2003). The club features in Sister George as
the setting for a costume party attended by Beryl Reid’s malicious June
‘George’ Buckridge and her naïve girlfriend, Alice ‘Childie’ McNaught
(Susannah York). During the Gateways sequence, George learns that
the character she plays in a fictional television soap opera is soon to be
killed off, and Childie begins to switch her affections to another woman,
precipitating the end of the couple’s volatile relationship. The use of the
Gateways as the backdrop for this part of the plot was an invention for
the screenplay, included to add variety and local colour to a film shot
mostly in California (Hankin 2001). To underline the authenticity of the
London location, the Gateways sequence included appearances from reg-
ular patrons as extras, as well as cameos from the club’s manager, Gina
Ware, and her co-manager, Smithy, an American ex-air-force woman,
who is shown serving drinks behind the bar (Jennings 2006, 221). Kelly
Hankin argues that the addition of the club scenes was also motivated
by a desire to tap into the popular fascination with lesbian bars in post-
war America, which was expressed elsewhere in ethnographic journal-
ism, sociological studies and pulp fiction (2001, 5). Images from the
Gateways scenes and anecdotes about the process of shooting on loca-
tion were used heavily in the publicity campaign for the film, playing on
what Hankin calls ‘the tacit cultural desire to locate and probe clandes-
tine lesbian space’ (2001, 7). The close-up, hand-held camerawork in
these scenes, which lingers on women dancing together, allows them to
be read both as intimate celebrations of lesbian affection and, conversely,
as prurient, potentially intrusive glimpses of queer lives packaged for
mainstream consumption (Fig. 2).
Fig. 2 George and Childie (right) celebrating in fancy dress at the Gateways
club in The Killing of Sister George (1968)
124 C. O’Rourke
When The Killing of Sister George was released in Britain in 1969,

some lesbian viewers in London appreciated seeing an aspect of their
lives reflected in film, and enjoyed the sight of a recognisable location
and familiar faces. ‘There was a roar when Smithy appeared on screen,’
recalled one woman, who had gone to the cinema looking as ‘straight’
as possible. ‘Only then did we realise the place was packed with lesbi-
ans’ (Gardiner 2003, 155). But the film also attracted criticism from an
increasingly vocal lesbian and gay activist community, who accused it of
portraying lesbian relationships as predatory and unnatural. As Rebecca
Jennings argues, the scenes set on location in the Gateways also had the
effect of focussing the attitudes of lesbians towards the city’s queer com-
mercial network, revealing notable intergenerational tensions. Whereas
older patrons of the Gateways valued the privacy offered by queer bars
and clubs, a younger generation of lesbians, politicised by the Women’s
Liberation and Gay Liberation movements of the late 1960s and early
1970s, challenged the dominance of commercial venues and their secre-
tive atmosphere, and called instead for greater rights of citizenship in the
public sphere (Jennings 2006, 224).
The tensions within the London lesbian community were expressed
clearly in a confrontation between the Gateways club and the Women’s
Group of the recently formed Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in 1971.
After the Women’s Group had been prevented by the Gateways man-
agement from selling tickets to a GLF event on the premises, and had
subsequently been banned for writing about the incident in the GLF
magazine, they organised a demonstration outside the club. A leaf-
let produced for the occasion accused the managers of hypocrisy: ‘The
Gateways has made thousands of pounds out of women who come to
the club (precisely how much money and publicity was gained from The
Killing of Sister George?) yet the management of the Gateways consid-
ers lesbians to be sick’ (quoted in Power 1995, 119–121). For the GLF
Women’s Group, the perception that the management had profited from
their involvement in Aldrich’s film but still seemed to recoil from align-
ing themselves with gay rights activism, was indicative of a larger imbal-
ance of power between the proprietors of queer venues and the people
who frequented them. As Jennings notes, for gay and lesbian activists,
spaces such as the Gateways now constituted ‘both an important public
symbol of lesbian community and … an example of a culture and identity
they wished to reject’ (Jennings 2006, 224). Seeing these spaces repre-
sented in film brought their conflicting meanings to the fore.
Nighthawks (1978)
In common with the critical response to the involvement of the
Gateways club in The Killing of Sister George, the 1978 film Nighthawks
was also informed by the Gay Liberation movement. The film’s central
plot, about a gay secondary school teacher struggling to be open about
his sexual identity at work, reinforced the Gay Liberation emphasis on
the importance of ‘coming out’ in the effort to alter social attitudes
(Weeks 1990, 185–190). The film also reflected a conscious effort to
represent a wider array of queer lifestyles than had previously been por-
trayed on screen. Interviewed in the magazine Gay News, the director
Ron Peck spoke of his desire to provide ‘a panorama of gay life’ in the
capital (Howes 1976, 16). While the more Bohemian side of London’s
queer subculture had recently been represented in the David Hockney
film A Bigger Splash (1973; released in Britain in 1975), Peck drew on
the experiences of a large cast of nonprofessional volunteers from diverse
backgrounds, weaving their personal stories into the narrative. The film
also took stock of the post-1967 expansion of London’s queer commer-
cial scene, and expressed some of the concerns voiced by the GLF and
other activist groups about the incompatibility of commercialism with a
progressive gay and lesbian politics.
Nighthawks follows its protagonist, Jim (Ken Robertson), on his daily
journeys through London as he moves to and from work, and visits gay
venues around the city in the evening. Many of the scenes were shot on
location, including a sequence in the Salisbury pub, which had been used
in Victim nearly two decades earlier. According to the first edition of the
Spartacus International Gay Guide published in 1970, at the start of
the boom in commercial queer venues, the Salisbury was considered to
be one of the more ‘outrageous’ gay pubs in London; the writer claimed
to have seen ‘married couples ejected as undesirable when queans have
been whooping it up on all sides’ (Anon 1970, 37). Little of this ‘outra-
geous’ atmosphere is represented in Nighthawks, though. In an echo of
‘Boy’ Barrett’s desperate telephone conversation with his estranged lover,
Jim spends much of his time in the Salisbury making calls on the pub’s
payphone. The mood in the later film is no longer of paranoia. But it is
replaced by a sense of isolation, as Jim waits in vain for his date to arrive,
and struggles to make contact with another man he has picked up on a
previous night. The problem of connecting with other gay men in the city,
despite the proliferation of places to meet, is a recurrent theme in the film.
126 C. O’Rourke
As well as documenting the city’s older queer venues, such as the

Salisbury, Nighthawks is also interested in exploring the city’s newer gay
clubs and discos, which emerged in the mid-1970s, in response to trends
in the gay scenes of New York and San Francisco (Shiers 1988). Much
of Jim’s time is spent in the fictional ‘Back Streets’ disco, a venue con-
structed on a sound stage, but modelled on club nights such as Bang!,
held in the former Astoria cinema on Charing Cross Road. Jim returns
to this location repeatedly—almost obsessively—to cruise the bar and
dancefloor. As James Leggott writes, these scenes cumulatively form a
picture of Jim’s life as ‘a cycle of one-night stands, reunions with former
conquests, more cruising and tentative relationships that fizzle out after a
couple of weeks’ (Leggott 2008, 100).
In its treatment of Jim’s divided life, the film contributes to the
criticisms of the commercial scene that had been voiced in earlier cin-
ematic depictions of queer London. By the 1970s, these criticisms
had combined with a more general critique of consumer culture, in
a way that was symptomatic of the increasing overlap between Gay
Liberation and socialist causes (Robinson 2007). Writing in 1976,
Barrie Kenyon, the vice-chairman of the Campaign for Homosexual
Equality, summed up the different sides of the debate over the domi-
nance of commercial spaces. On the one hand, he said, pubs and clubs
were important meeting places for gay men and lesbians. On the other
hand, some people believed that homosexual-only venues constituted
a ‘gay ghetto’ and were indicative of ‘a repressed society and of self-
oppression’ (Kenyon 1976, 15). In an article published the same year,
members of the Gay Left Collective—a group with which Peck and the
film’s producer, Paul Hallam, were associated—explained their objec-
tions to what they saw as the incursion of capitalist values into the gay
and lesbian community. The atmosphere in London’s gay venues, they
said, was often ‘competitive, commercialised and sexist,’ and the ven-
ues themselves were frequently run by straight people in the business
of exploiting a captive market (Gay Left Collective 1976).
The bar and disco sequences in Nighthawks allow for a reading that
supports the Gay Left stance. The use of lengthy, roving shots in these
scenes was a technique reportedly intended to evoke the erotic charge
of the disco and the ‘cruising eye’ of its patrons, but it was felt by some
viewers to show these venues in a depressing light (Cant 1978–1979,
31). The cyclical pattern of Jim’s life on the commercial scene also adds
to the impression that he is trapped on the pub-club-disco circuit. The
reviewer Jack Babuscio suggested that the film ‘quite rightly encourages
us to wonder whether the “gay world” isn’t really a “straight” created
form of apartheid’ (Babuscio 1979, 31). The final sequence, filmed in
the real London disco Glades (in the venue that would later become
London’s first gay ‘superclub’, Heaven), ends on a characteristically
ambivalent note. As Jim leads his new boyfriend, John, onto the dance-
floor, his spot is immediately taken by another man, who stares back
into the crowd. The camera then pans slowly across the packed room,
accompanied by the repetitive sounds of David Graham Ellis’s disco-
inspired score (Fig. 3). As with the Gateways sequence in The Killing of
Sister George, the scene invites more than one response from gay view-
ers. For Richard Dyer, Jim’s immediate replacement by another man on
the edges of the dancefloor, along with the ‘inferno-like’ image of the
disco with which the film ends, epitomises the representation of cruis-
ing in the film as a ‘seemingly joyless’ activity (Dyer 2003, 247). At the
same time, it was widely publicised in the gay press that the 600 extras in
Fig. 3 Dancers at Glades disco in the final sequence of Nighthawks (1978)

128 C. O’Rourke
this sequence were recruited from gay venues around the city (Anon
1978, 22). In this context, the scene could also be understood as a cel-
ebration of same-sex desire and gay community, linking Jim’s story of
coming out at work to the decision of so many other men to declare
their sexual identity on screen by appearing as themselves in the film.
Overall, many viewers appreciated the film’s efforts to represent
London’s gay community from within, and sympathised with its attempt
to express the conflicted attitudes towards London’s queer bars and dis-
cos. But some viewers felt that the film failed to show the more posi-
tive ways in which the London gay and lesbian community had organised
outside of commercial venues, such as the annual Gay Pride rallies and
marches, held in London from 1972, and the various support groups
and gay communes that had been set up in the city during the 1970s
(Baker 1978–1979, 22–23). Other viewers resented the critical por-
trayal of gay bars and clubs. In response to the ongoing debate about
Nighthawks in the letters page of Gay News, a contributor from South
London explained that the film’s ambivalent representation of the queer
commercial scene came as no surprise to his social circle. ‘We are well
used to the hysterical bleatings of the (mainly left) gay movement,’ he
wrote, ‘and their silly myth that “the scene” exists solely for the purpose
of the casual pick-up.’ Rather than being used exclusively for superfi-
cial sexual encounters, he insisted, commercial venues were also ‘places
to meet friends, play pool, have a drink and a chat.’ He concluded that
the film was ‘a perfect example of the introspection and irrelevance
of the gay movement’ in the face of such a thriving commercial scene
(McAnally 1979, 12).
Conclusion
The status of queer Londoners, legally and socially, changed dramatically
between the 1950s and the 1970s. In this period, London’s queer spaces
served as a focal point for national debates on issues such as homo-
sexual law reform, Gay Liberation and the commercialisation of queer
urban culture. Depictions of queer London on film participated in these
debates, offering a sympathetic view of the plight of male homosexuals
in Victim, and increasingly providing a way for gay men and lesbians to
challenge media representations of homosexuality, and to reflect on their
own individual and collective public identities.
The disagreements over how cinema dealt with queer bars and clubs
reveal the diversity of London’s queer population. Just as the response
to the participation of the Gateways club in The Killing of Sister George
highlighted intergenerational tensions within London’s lesbian subcul-
ture, the reception of Nighthawks in the pages of the gay press exposed
splits among gay men along lines of political affiliation. While some
viewers sympathised with the film’s critical depiction of bars and dis-
cos as part of an oppressive ‘gay ghetto’, others insisted on the con-
tinuing importance of such venues to the social lives of gay men in the
capital. These responses point to larger differences within the emerg-
ing lesbian and gay ‘community’ in London and at a national level. As
Matt Cook notes, not everyone in the 1970s felt comfortable aligning
themselves with the radical politics of Gay Liberation, nor did everyone
share their critical attitude towards the expansion of the gay commercial
scene (Cook 2007, 186–187, 189). The contentious response to film
versions of queer London also underlines the fact that, while such cin-
ematic representations were few and far between in this period, they still
had the potential to shape public discourse on queer sexual identities in
important ways.
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14–January 10.
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Popular Press 1918–1978. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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———. 2007. From Gay Reform to Gaydar, 1967–2006. In A Gay History of
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the 1970s. In Seventies British Cinema, ed. Robert Shail, 94–104. London:
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Nineteenth Century to the Present, 2nd ed. London: Quartet.
Housing Policy and Building Types: From
High Hopes to High-Rise
Amy Sargeant
In 2013, concern and consternation were voiced with the appearance on

hoardings outside the V&A, South Kensington, of an advertisement for
the sale of desirably located luxury apartments. Surely, even in an age
of austere cuts in arts budgets and the disposal of public buildings to
private developers, a hallowed institution such as the V&A would be
exempt from such dire and desperate measures?1 As visitors were soon
to discover, the hoardings announced the installation ‘Tomorrow’, then
on show in the museum. The piece imagined the life of Norman Swann,
74, an architect of unrealised Brutalist projects. It drew on the V&A’s
collection of artefacts, many originally destined for domestic settings,
and sometimes worn threadbare by generations’ use, conveying Swann’s
inherited material privilege. The museum also supplied the fictitious
architect’s models, drawings and books. The piece was accompanied by a
script, ‘Scenes from an Unrealised Film’, produced by the V&A’s invited
artists, Elmgreen & Dragset (2013). A constant soundtrack of showering
intimated that Swann had not yet left the building. His presence was still
amply felt.
A. Sargeant (*) 
Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, New York, USA
e-mail: amysargeant@hotmail.co.uk

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64979-5_10
134 A. Sargeant
This chapter is concerned with housing policy and recurrent hous-

ing types, ‘desirable’ and otherwise. The action of their screen coun-
terparts is sometimes grounded and realised in London (High Hopes,
Broken, Tower Block, Exhibition); sometimes locations elsewhere substi-
tute for London settings (Chromophobia, High-Rise). The spaces these
films explore include streets, suburban estates, tower blocks and state-
ment homes, mediating concerns about feminisation, violence and the
tension between market forces and social interests. It seems worth not-
ing, in passing, the presence of characters who mark the segregation of
London housing types by traversing across and between them: a taxi
driver in Mike Leigh’s All or Nothing (2002), a drug dealer in Eran
Creevy’s Shifty (2008) and a woman seeking to resolve (or escape) an
identity crisis through a series of anonymous sexual encounters in Zadie
Smith’s 2012 novel, NW. Perhaps their Londons could be any number
of comparable metropolitan, cosmopolitan big cities.
Streets
In Mike Leigh’s High Hopes (1988) Mrs Bender’s house, overshad-
owed by a high-rise, is the last remaining council property on her ter-
race. Its smoky and dilapidated facade is starkly flanked by sand-blasted
London brick and immaculately fresh paintwork, frontages exemplifying
gentrification by collective social action as distinct from the gentrifica-
tion of London, not least King’s Cross, by capital (Butler and Robson
2003, 26). ‘This was a different street when I was a kid—before the
middle classes moved in,’ says Mrs Bender’s son, Cyril (Philip Davis),
meaning thereby not merely its appearance, but, more significantly, its
social constituency and sense of community. Cyril, a despatch driver
(evidence of a globalising economy) and his girlfriend Shirley (Ruth
Sheen), who works as a gardener for the council and tends aptly named
cacti at home, meanwhile inhabit a flat originally constructed for rail-
way workers—a Victorian precursor, by way of subsidy and philan-
thropy, of council tenancy acknowledging the challenges of dense urban
living, lack of supply and low wages.2 Cyril and Shirley charitably take
in Wayne (Jason Watkins) from Byfleet, who cannot locate his sis-
ter in London. When pensioner Mrs Bender (Edna Doré) mislays her
purse and keys she turns to her neighbours, the Booth-Braines (David
Bamber and Lesley Manville) for help. From their Barbour outfitting
and mud-splattered vehicle it is evident that the Booth-Braines spend
HOUSING POLICY AND BUILDING TYPES … 135
their weekends in the country. Reluctantly, they allow Mrs Bender in

but refuse to accommodate her battered shopping trolley. Tea is prof-
fered while the Booth-Braines contact Cyril and his unsympathetic sis-
ter, Valerie (Heather Tobias).
Laetitia Booth-Braine patronisingly suggests that a three-bedroomed
house is no longer suitable to Mrs Bender’s needs. Informed that the
house belongs to the council, Laetitia refers to tenants as ‘you people’,
clearly differentiating her own status as owner-occupier. When she asks
Mrs Bender whether she still has her ‘original features’ she does not
mean Mrs Bender’s teeth but, rather, floors, cornices, fireplaces and so
forth. Laetitia suggests a granny flat as more practical—not stopping to
think that Mrs Bender may prefer to stay put, nor to consider that she
may be emotionally attached to the house in which she has raised dis-
cordant children—and insensitively tells her that council tenants now
have the opportunity to buy their homes and ‘then, of course, sell-on’.
Cyril duly accuses Valerie, in sight of ‘a goldmine’, of intending this
course of action on her mother’s death.
Laetitia is, here, a spokesperson for the Thatcherite policy of ‘Right to
Buy’. The policy was partly motivated by pragmatic concerns (a declared
agenda to cut public expenditure, disproportionately carried by hous-
ing); partly political (Thatcher herself claimed its promise as responsible,
in no small measure, for her election in 1979 and its success for subse-
quent re-election); and partly ideological (a belief in the intrinsic merit
of home ownership, incentivised by mortgage interest tax relief, accom-
panied by the promotion of the private rental sector) (Malpass 2005,
21). By 1979, says Lesley Hanley, almost half the British population lived
in council housing (2007, 98). The consequence of underinvestment
in new building, inadequate repair of existing stock and privatisation
through the ‘Right to Buy’ policy dramatically reduced the proportion
throughout the 1980s, and its decline continued thereafter (Malpass
2005, 2–3; Boffey 2016, 6). Laetitia, In High Hopes, seemingly can-
not conceive Mrs Bender being unable to afford the heavily discounted
deposit for which she could qualify as a longstanding tenant of her house
(Malpass 2005, 110).
By way of contrast, Leigh celebrates a traditional model of working-class
solidarity in All or Nothing. External walkways on the low-rise South-East
London estate (its location, somewhat ironically, intended for demoli-
tion), with their individually customised doors, function spatially and
socially as ‘streets’ (in Cyril’s sense) ‘in the air’. Maureen (Ruth Sheen)
136 A. Sargeant
supports her neighbour, Penny (Lesley Manville), a fellow supermarket

check-out assistant, when Penny’s son, Rory (James Corden), is taken into
hospital. On the other hand, Leigh is typically dismissive of Valerie’s subur-
ban displacement in High Hopes (as he is, indeed, of Vera’s sister-in-law in
the 2004 film Vera Drake, with Vera herself occupying a flat comparable to
that of Cyril and Shirley). Valerie’s wallpapering is, observes Cyril, ‘loud’,
and Shirley observes that the arrangement of a clunkily oversized chess set
demonstrates an ignorance of the game: it is an affectation. Shirley and
Cyril dub Valerie’s husband Martin (Phillip Jackson)—appropriately sur-
named Burke—‘the wanker in the tanker’ and ‘the jerk in the merc’, and
Shirley deftly rebuffs his clumsy sexual advances. Neurotic Valerie spoils
an Afghan hound she calls ‘Baby’. Leigh’s palpable prejudice towards
the suburbs is far from novel nor unique, prompted by its representation
of a desire for social mobility and the feminisation of that desire. Roger
Silverstone explains that whereas the male suburban experience creates
crucial distinctions between work and leisure, weekday and weekend, ‘the
suburbanisation of culture has often been equated by its many critics with
a feminisation of culture,’ that is ‘built around the ideology and reality of
women’s domestication’ (1997, 7).
Suburbia
The Elmstead Close cul-de-sac in Broken (2012), directed by Rufus
Norris, is emphatically feminised in the absence or deficiency of mothers.
A deserted solicitor, Archie Cunningham (Tim Roth) lives in the middle
house with his son, Jed, a diabetic daughter, Skunk (Eloise Laurence),
and a Polish au pair—a substitute mother—Kasia (Zana Marjanovic).
Skunk spends much of her time in a lair built with her friend, Dillon, in
an abandoned caravan (surely an epitome of a once modern suburban
lifestyle) amongst similarly cast-off boats and other debris. Dillon and his
aunt—his substitute mother—get moved to Birmingham, and he bids
farewell. Skunk is bullied at school by the youngest of the three neigh-
bouring Oswald daughters. Lives in the detached ‘Wimpey’ houses of
the close are not as matched nor as self-contained as the façades suggest,
nor is suburbia impervious to change. Physically, in-fill encroaches.
On the other side, in a nod towards its Tudorbethan antecedents, the
Buckley interior is equipped with dark-stained mock timber beams and
bracing.3 With good cause, Janet Buckley (Clare Burt) is overprotective
of her son, Rick, whom widower Mr Oswald (Rory Kinnear) names a
‘retard’. Mr Buckley (Denis Lawson), in turn, considers the Oswald

daughters to be ‘animals’, who ‘should be put in a home’. When Susan
Oswald falls pregnant, her father accuses Rick of rape and, out on the
tarmac, throws a punch at Mr Buckley. The other daughters accuse
Mike (Cillian Murphy), a school teacher (and Kasia’s former boyfriend).
He, too, falls victim to Bob Oswald’s distraught violence. Archie, now
in a relationship with Kasia himself, defends Mike against the girls’ alle-
gations. Jed is more likely to be the baby’s father. In this microcosmic
cul-de-sac, ‘neighbourly’ behaviour has broken down.
Grenfell Tower
Over recent years, Ben Wheatley and his writing partner Amy Jump have
proved themselves prime authors of domestic or, rather, domiciliary vio-
lence, from the Essex gangster ‘manor’ of Down Terrace (2009), through
the murderous caravanning spree in Sightseers (2012) via the suburban
retributions and pagan rites horrifically enacted in the grounds of a
stately home in Kill List (2011). Their 2015 adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s
1975 novel High-Rise thus found them in congenial territory.
Ballard’s high-rise recalls the biblical fable of the Tower of Babel, in
which God had punished the vain pride of humans (demonstrated by
their attempt to build a tower to reach the sky) by laying upon them
the confusion of tongues, which resulted in their dispersion into ethnic
groups. In both book and film, residents divide themselves across the
concrete apartment block’s multiple stories firstly by class, with ‘people
tightly fitting into slots’, and secondly by tribe. In the film, the domain
of the upper class is clearly demarcated by an abrupt angling of the top
ten storeys of the tower, with a horizontal band marking the block mid-
way. The building’s architect shares a kinship with the V&A’s Norman
Swann. Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons), progenitor and ‘midwife’, he
says, of this misguided folly, inhabits a penthouse suite, accessed by a pri-
vate lift, in which he hosts Versailles-themed parties, together with his
wife, Anne (Keeley Hawes) who—a latterday Marie Antoinette—keeps a
white horse (destined for slaughter and consumption) on the roof gar-
den (a match for Royal’s white Alsatian) and a beribboned black goat.
In this fictional rendition of The Raft of the Medusa, Ballard’s residents
eventually descend into bestiality—cannibalism. One might also choose
to view High-Rise as an ‘adult’ re-envisioning of William Golding’s 1954
novel Lord of the Flies (translated to screen by Peter Brook in 1963).
138 A. Sargeant
In an opening voice-over, Laing (Tom Hiddleston), who occupies

an apartment on the twenty-fifth floor, speculates on the action depict-
ing a future that has already taken place. The film, in the manner of
Michael Radford’s 1940s setting for 1984 (1984), advisedly locates itself
in the 1970s, not least by way of properties (cars and fitted interiors)
and costuming. Royal uniformly dons a white safari jacket while Richard
Wilder (Luke Evans), the producer of a television documentary intended
to expose and foment resistance within the tower (a Bonaparte of the
elevator) (Ballard 2016, 148), wears kipper ties, denim flares and a Che
Guevara moustache. His wife, Helen (Elisabeth Moss), heavily preg-
nant (underscoring his infidelities and final desertion of her) wears folksy
prints and dungarees. Wilder warns Royal to watch out: ‘there’s some
very unhappy bunnies bouncing about.’
‘The first part of the programme,’ said Ballard, ‘would examine life
in the high-rise in terms of design errors and minor irritations while the
remainder would then look at the psychology of living in a community
of two thousand people boxed up into the sky.’ This is translated in the
film as ‘mania, narcissism and power failure’:
All the evidence accumulated over several decades cast a critical light on
the high-rise as a viable social structure, but cost-effectiveness in the area
of public housing and high profitability in the private sector kept pushing
these vertical townships into the sky against the real needs of their occu-
pants. (Ballard 2016, 68)
So far, so routine. The book and the film examine an extreme case of a famil-
iar scenario. ‘Long derided as planning folly,’ comments Andrew Burke, ‘the
concrete high-rises of the 1960s serve as an objective reminder and architec-
tural remainder of an era in the history of housing now commonly under-
stood to have been as corrupt as it was misguided’ (2007, 177).
The naming of Dr Robert Laing, invokes the anti-psychiatrist Ronald
(R. D.) Laing, a charismatic counter-cultural populist at the time of the
novel’s publication (Porter 1998, 257). Contrary to prevailing cultural
opinion that tower blocks constituted an abomination, Ballard’s Laing is
ultimately grateful to Royal for the tower’s limitless possibilities allowing
him to follow whatever perverse pathways he chooses to follow, includ-
ing incest: ‘it no longer mattered how he behaved’ (Ballard 2016, 246).
The film’s Laing is a physiologist who refuses Royal’s request that he
lobotomise Wilder: ‘he’s possibly the sanest man in the building.’
Fig. 1 The tower block surrounded by others under construction in High-Rise

(2015)
The concrete tower, one of five projected by Royal to radiate as if

from the palm of a hand (see Fig. 1), recalls le Corbusier’s notion of
the Unité d’habitation (von Moos 1985, 110, 157–59; Chadwick 2016,
107), with its children’s playground, squash court (in which Royal tests
Laing), its fifteenth-floor supermarket (in which food rots as the power
supply collapses and riots break out as the shelves empty) and a swim-
ming pool (in which debris and the body of Eleanor Powell’s Afghan
hound are unceremoniously dumped). Yet Royal’s declared agenda
for the building—‘a crucible for change,’ he says to Laing—reminds
the viewer also of the German émigré architect, Walter Gropius. ‘The
German press say he’s a genius,’ says Anne of her husband, whom Wilder
calls Herr Royal. Royal presumes himself to be a social and psychologi-
cal engineer as much as he congratulates himself on the structure (which
soon cracks), his careful selection of surfaces (soon defaced) and instal-
lation of technology (soon defunct). Manuals issued to residents on
‘correct’ use of the building’s facilities soon prove redundant. Bernard
Michael Boyle provides a scathing summary and critique of Gropius:
Again and again [he] wrote of the need to make the architect a co-ordi-
nator of social, psychological, and economic facts, as much as an artist
and technologist. But the social facts Gropius referred to were the facts of
behaviorism; the psychological facts were the facts of perceptual psychol-
ogy; and the economic facts were the facts of industry, mass production,
140 A. Sargeant
and commerce. Ethics for Gropius meant truth in the use of materials, not
general morality … and for traditional religious belief Gropius substituted
a ‘new spatial vision’ whose power to persuade was less transcendental than
‘intellectual’ and ‘objective’. (Boyle 1977, 341–42)
Children demolish Royal’s models and shred his drawings to feath-

ers; Royal’s henchmen taunt Laing for flying too close to their sun.
Significantly, Wheatley locates Royal’s hubristic tower amidst cranes
deployed on the construction of towers as yet incomplete, foreshadow-
ing the redevelopment by capital of London’s Docklands (a future antici-
pated by John Mackenzie’s 1979 film The Long Good Friday). High-Rise
closes with Thatcher, in voice-over, extolling the virtues of ‘The Free
Enterprise System’.
‘Serenity’ in Ronnie Thompson and James Nunn’s Tower Block (2011)
nostalgically refers to the optimism and promise which high-rises were
accorded as a solution to housing needs after the World War II.4 But,
declares an opening title sequence:
They deteriorated and became a breeding ground for crime and violence.
Redevelopers took over, knocking them down.
However, it’s not easy moving out existing tenants.
In Serenity House, located in Tower Hamlets, the top-floor residents are

the last to remain. The lift to the top for Becky (Sheridan Smith) is a
place of stress rather than easy communication. Kurtis (Jack O’Connell)
extorts protection money from the survivors. Power supplies are unre-
liable and lights come on and go off intermittently in this customarily
silhouetted tower. In High-Rise the building and its community destroys
itself from within. Serenity House falls victim to extreme intimidation
from without, forcing Becky to organise her corridor’s collective resist-
ance. Kurtis can do nothing to defend his stranded neighbours against
booby traps and snipers, while Jenny (Montserrat Lombard) bemoans
that there has been an absence of community action in response to pre-
vious catastrophes: a community comes together only in extremity. In a
final counter-attack, Kurtis loads a microwave with metal—an echo of
the 1968 Ronan Point disaster, in which a gas explosion resulted in the
collapse of multiple floors of a West Ham tower.5
Tower Block also horrifically projects and amplifies a contemporary

housing strategy, whereby tenants are offered incentives, including com-
pulsory purchase of flats bought under ‘Right to Buy’ schemes, to move
out of sites marked by private interests for lucrative redevelopment.6 The
consequent loss of social housing stock is bad for the present and bodes
ill for the future.
Statement Homes
Andrew Saint has identified a number of persistent controversies sur-
rounding the architectural profession:
Is it an art practised by and for the sake of individuals, or a commercial

enterprise geared to the needs of the market and the generation of profit,
or a communal undertaking dedicated to the service of society? Most
enquirers rash enough to essay a serious answer to these questions have
ended in admitting compromise—each or some of these ideas have a place
in the best architecture. (Saint 1983, 6)
Amongst architects imagined in recent British cinema, Royal, in High-

Rise, appears to be an egotist whose vision is fostered and realised by
prevailing market forces. Will (Jude Law) in Anthony Minghella’s 2006
Breaking and Entering declares his environmentalist credentials and con-
cerns: his plans for the redevelopment of King’s Cross will, he asserts
and hopes, incorporate green space serving as more than decoration
on a map. Martha Fiennes’s Chromophobia (2005) and Joanna Hogg’s
Exhibition (2013) both feature statement homes commissioned by indi-
vidual clients. In the latter instance, the Kensington house designed,
for his own use, in 1969 by the architect to whom the film is dedicated
becomes the main protagonist of the narrative. The former is rendered
as commodity, a material acquisition, a setting serving as a demarcation
from others.
Chromophobia is an example of a typical London scenario whereby
apparently disparate lives are shown to be or become interconnected
(other examples include Zadie Smith’s NW, recently adapted for televi-
sion, John Lanchester’s 2012 Capital, similarly adapted, Jasmin Dizdar’s
1999 Beautiful People and Jim O’Hanlon’s less successful 2016 100
Streets). Chromophobia’s moral thrust is guided by a newly appointed car-
ing and conscientious social worker, Colin (Rhys Ifans). He discovers
142 A. Sargeant
Gloria (Penélope Cruz), a prostitute (sex work as a globally market-

able commodity) who has managed to fluff and forage a nest for herself
and her daughter in an overlooked ‘crack’ between derelict buildings.
Gloria is dying. Ignoring the advice of colleagues not to become person-
ally involved, Colin takes it upon himself to book a B&B room, so that
mother and child remain together for as long as possible. Meanwhile, in
another part of town, a corporate lawyer, Marcus Aylesbury (Damien
Lewis), and his would be art-dealer wife, Iona (Kristen Scott-Thomas),
inhabit a sprawling, white, modernist, minimalist slab. The couple’s
relationship is not so solid. A hard outer shell fails to protect Iona from
her inner insecurities, and she proceeds to discard the designer-labelled
clothes (on the wearing of which her husband passes little comment
and faint praise) and embarks upon a remodelling of her own body.
The young son lacks parental attention and affection: in protest, he
spray-paints his pet rabbit’s name across a vast expanse of wall. Marcus’s
father, a retired judge (Ian Holm), speaks on behalf of acceptable codes
of public conduct. Privately, Aylesbury senior has employed the ser-
vices of Gloria and fathered her child. Finally, Colin visits the daughter
at the judge’s country home where she plays happily amongst Penelope
Aylesbury’s well-nurtured rose bushes.
Bodies are accommodated by way of more everyday contents and
discontents in the intensified interiority of Exhibition. However, its cur-
rent incumbents exhibit and express their attachment to and detach-
ment from the building differently, before, ultimately, ceding occupation
to an incoming East Asian family. The film depicts twinned labours of
love, between a companionable couple and between this couple and its
outworn shell. This house is not passive: screens demand careful folding;
the flat roof requires sweeping; appliances require maintenance—it com-
mands dutiful attention. Human relationships also must be kept in good
repair in order to work.
For H. (Liam Gillick) and D. (Viv Albertine) the house is a place of
both work and leisure. Neither (unlike Cyril and Shirley in High Hopes)
are called upon to appear daily at some other place of employment. This
house is a place of concentrated effort, ruminating, ‘just working’, minor
and major distractions (not least one another of the couple) and tension.
At the back of the house, a private pool allows D., naked, to revolve lux-
uriantly, invulnerably. Yet in this house designed to blank out engage-
ment with the street, D. is alerted when noise (scaffolding, traffic, sirens)
impinges on her inner sanctum. Initially, she becomes anxious when

H. goes out at night—she is even concerned that he is ‘alright’ in the
house—but it may be that she is displacing her own anxiety about send-
ing her work out into the world and having to explain it, to articulate
her performance in words. D. demonstratively locks, bolts and checks
a keypad to bolster her sense of security. After receiving a reassuring
phone call, she confidently ventures out alone into her locality, greets
neighbours by day and, at night, takes a bus into the centre of town and
walks through Trafalgar Square, tipping a performer at the steps of the
National Gallery.
After eighteen years—which seem to H. like forty—in the house,
D. says that she can feel the happiness of the previous owners’ mar-
riage ‘in the walls’. She seeks a guarantee from the estate agent (Tom
Hiddleston) that the house will be left intact by any prospective owner;
with a view to his percentage fee, perhaps (is he or H. the King of the
soundtrack’s Counting-House?), he suggests that she need not be there
when his clients visit—as if out of sight for her is out of mind. The film
opens with D. lying on a windowsill, like a sleepy, stripey cat sunning
itself. Before she leaves, she bends her body around corners and bur-
rows under a table. D.’s attachment to the house is intimate, sensual
and poetic, the fleshy warm colours and comfortable clutter of her stu-
dio—the tools of her trade—contrasting with H.’s cool and spartan
monochrome (Bachelard 1994, 30–32, 136). H., on the other hand,
aggressively defends the house as his castle, as though its flat façade forti-
fies his domain against unwelcome intrusion. He argues with a van driver
who has mistaken the property as business premises, insisting on a clear
demarcation between public (‘everyone else’s bit’) and private space (‘my
bit’) (see Fig. 2). He appreciates the human proportions of the house
but expresses these in terms of a mathematical unit, a module akin to
Le Corbusier’s Modulor (Le Corbusier 1977). He more readily detaches
himself—‘there’s nothing to stop us’ (they have no children)—and looks
forward to a future home as a self-indulgent project—a Grand Design,
perhaps. In a symbolic purge, the couple mark their departure with a
party, demolishing a cake model of the house that has consumed and fed
their energies for so long. A fire-eater performs in the garden.
A reading of the editorial and property pages of London’s Evening
Standard over recent years confirms that the legacy of the 1980s is still
with us. Conversion of public buildings and office space only partially
144 A. Sargeant
Fig. 2 H. insists on the demarcation between public and private space in

Exhibition (2013)
satisfies the demand for housing. Consecutive governments have failed to

supply a need for new affordable accommodation and London, as a whole,
is becoming increasingly unaffordable. Greater London is increasingly seg-
regating itself from the rest of the country in terms of its affordability. On
the one hand, there are campaigns to improve facilities and alleviate the
fear of violence and crime in housing estates castigated as ‘sink’. There is
a continuing need for shelter at the most basic level. At the other end of
the economic spectrum—not least in Kensington, which has imposed a
partial ban—there is now subterranean excavation down into iceberg base-
ment extensions to provide for differently perceived needs (private swim-
ming pools and gymnasia, private cinemas)—conveying not just economic
anxieties (the value of housing as a commodity) but a retreat from social
engagement at street level (Bloomfield and Morgan 2016, 28): an aspira-
tional, personalised, high-rise underground. There is a long history of con-
cern for inner London’s skyline and the city’s horizontal sprawl outwards.
Now fears may better be reserved for its physical and social substructure—
before they collapse.
Notes
1. For recent discussion of the sale of public buildings, see Glaister (2016).
2. For instance, the work of Octavia Hill and the Peabody and Guinness
Trusts.
3. For an appreciative discussion of suburban taste for pastiche see Richards
(1946, 69–70) and Oliver (1981, 161).
4. For a discussion of pre- and postwar attitudes to high-rises, see Sargeant
(2009).
5. Ronan Point was one of a number of demolished towers featured in the
2016 RIBA exhibition, ‘Designing the House of Tomorrow’. Recently
(2009–12) demolished blocks include the South-East London estate used
for Gary Oldman’s Nil by Mouth (1997). See also Moore (2016, 30) for
commentary on 1960s estates worth saving.
6. For the redevelopment of blocks for mixed residency and resistance to
compulsory purchase orders, see Prynn (2016a, 3; 2016b, 28).
References
Bachelard, Gaston. 1994. The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon
Press.
Ballard, J.G. 2016. High-Rise. London: Fourth Estate.
Bloomfield, Ruth, and Ben Morgan. 2016. Queen’s Niece Halts Neighbour’s
Basement. Evening Standard, January 12: 28.
Boffey, Daniel. 2016. Social Housing in the UK Now at Record Low. Observer,
September 9: 6.
Boyle, Bernard Michael. 1977. Architectural Practice in America, 1865–1965:
Ideal and Reality. In The Architect, ed. Spiro Kostof, 309–344. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Burke, Andrew. 2007. Concrete Universality: Tower Blocks, Architectural
Modernism, and Realism in Contemporary British Cinema. New Cinemas:
Journal of Contemporary Film 5 (3): 177–188.
Butler, Tim, and Gary Robson. 2003. London Calling: The Middle Classes and
the Re-making of Inner London. Oxford: Berg.
Chadwick, Peter. 2016. This Brutal World. London: Phaidon.
Elmgreen & Dragset. 2013. Tomorrow. London: V&A.
Glaister, Dan. 2016. Parks, Libraries, Halls: Cities Pay Price of Austerity by
Selling Their Heritage. Observer, December 18: 10–11.
Hanley, Lynsey. 2007. Estates: An Intimate History. London: Granta.
Lanchester, John. 2012. Capital. London: Faber & Faber.
146 A. Sargeant
Le Corbusier. 1977. The Modulor: A Harmonious Measure to the Human Scale

Universally applicable to Architecture and Mechanics. trans. Peter de Francia
and Anna Bostock. London: Faber & Faber.
Malpass, Peter. 2005. Housing and the Welfare State: The Development of Housing
Policy in Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Moore, Rowan. 2016. We’ve Been Down This Path Before. Observer New
Review, January 31.
Oliver, Paul, Ian Davis, and Ian Bentley. 1981. Dunroamin: The Suburban Semi
and Its Enemies. London: Barrie and Jenkins.
Porter, Roy. 1998. Anti-Psychiatry and the Family: Taking the Long View.
In Cultures of Psychiatry and Mental Health Care in Postwar Britain and
the Netherlands, eds. Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, and Roy Porter, 257–294.
Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Prynn, Jonathan. 2016a. Lovely Jubbly: Home on Estate Where Only Fools and
Horses Was Filmed Sells for £11 m. Evening Standard, November 22.
———. 2016b. Estate Residents Elated after Bid to Remove Them Is Thrown
Out. Evening Standard, September 20.
Richards, J.M. 1946. The Castles on the Ground. London: Architectural Press.
Saint, Andrew. 1983. The Image of the Architect. New Haven and London: Yale
University Press.
Sargeant, Amy. 2009. Sparrows Can’t Sing: East End Kith and Kinship in the
1960s. Journal of British Cinema and Television 6 (2): 256–266.
Silverstone, Roger (ed.). 1997. Visions of Suburbia. London: Routledge.
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MA: MIT Press.
A Melancholy Topography: Patrick Keiller’s
London
David Anderson
Patrick Keiller’s films London (1994), Robinson in Space (1997) and

Robinson in Ruins (2010) form a loose trilogy of essayistic, witty and
politicised depictions of English landscape and townscape. They are fic-
tional documentaries, which is to say that while the footage consists of
unstaged actualities, the films are structured around the peregrinations
and preoccupations of a fictional researcher named Robinson: a disgrun-
tled, disillusioned yet urbane figure whose ‘expeditions’ and thoughts
are conveyed in laconic voiceover by a separate, accompanying Narrator.
Neither figure ever strays into the precisely framed, almost exclusively
fixed-camera shots. As a group, the films unfurl a vision of an England
scored by disarray, disrepair and disorientation, but which also—by
means of its transmission through the prism of Keiller’s lens and the sub-
jectivity of ‘Robinson’—seems to contain within it the possibility of radi-
cal, even utopian, change.
London marked a pivotal moment in Keiller’s practice. His first fea-
ture-length film and his first to be shot in colour, it was also the first
to garner significant funding, with £180,000 provided by Channel 4
D. Anderson (*) 
University College London, London, England
e-mail: david.anderson@ucl.ac.uk

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64979-5_11
148 D. Anderson
(Sinclair 2003, 300). Produced by the BFI’s Keith Griffiths and shot on a
newsreel camera, it is a rich and highly stylised account of the late-millen-
nial city in social, material and ideological decay. In the programme notes
for its 1994 premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, Keiller described it as:
a film about a city in decline, and about the roots of that decline in culture
and politics, in the form of a fictional journal about the year 1992. This
saw the surprise re-election of the hapless John Major as Prime Minister;
the renewal of the IRA’s bombing campaign in mainland Britain; the ‘fall
of the house of Windsor’; the bungled devaluation of the pound and its
sudden withdrawal from the European Monetary System, and various
other scandals, bankruptcies etc. (Keiller 1995, 54)
Keiller’s matter-of-fact description downplays the unusualness of the

film, which, like its sequels, immediately strikes one as markedly at odds
with conventional narrative cinema, and almost as far removed from
the conventional ‘objectivity’ of documentary. In fact, for a film whose
appearance, at least, suggests sober reportage, a mood of unsettlement
sets in from the outset of London, when the ceremonial opening of
Tower Bridge is accompanied by the Narrator’s wearied voice issuing a
jeremiad on ‘Dirty Old Blighty’, and the ‘horror of home’. The lilt of
Paul Scofield’s narration is by turns heated and listless, and we soon find
ourselves caught up in what the writer Iain Sinclair has termed ‘a polemic
that is half in love with the thing that it denounces’; marooned in ‘a fab-
ulation backed by congeries of improbable fact’ (2003, 302–303).
London might well be read as a late addition to the ‘city symphony’
genre, in the tradition of Alberto Cavalcanti or Walter Ruttmann:
William Raban’s 1986 Thames Film, a maudlin account of the city’s
waterway narrated by John Hurt, offers one precedent here. With its self-
conscious blend of fiction and fact it might also be bracketed under the
broad church of the ‘essay film’: to be sure, the Narrator’s early obser-
vation that ‘it is not generally agreed that Montaigne lived for a time
in London’ both alludes to the progenitor of the essay form and—with
Scofield’s languid delivery gliding straight past the ‘not’—functions as a
marker of the narrative’s wilful subjectivity. In fact, the film is shaped
by two decisive influences. The first is the London counterculture of
the 1960s and 1970s, centrally the London Film-Maker’s Co-operative,
of which Keiller was a member. In 2003 he cited a Co-op screening of
A MELANCHOLY TOPOGRAPHY: PATRICK KEILLER’S LONDON 149
Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) as a formative moment, and the impact

of its still-image construction on London is certainly clear (Keiller 2013,
156). The Co-op’s actual appropriation of urban space, meanwhile—
by making use of squatted industrial buildings—found its analogue in
Keiller’s creative recreation of real spaces in film, a subject on which he
elaborated in essays written for the Co-op’s own magazine, Undercut, in
the 1980s (Keiller 2003). The second key influence on Keiller, consonant
with the Co-op’s left-wing political alignment, is what Keith Griffiths
(1994) has referred to as ‘an important legacy of “poetic” documentary
cinema’ in spite of which ‘the film still takes an audience by surprise’: the
stylised reportage of figures like Humphrey Jennings and John Grierson.
Keiller has written of his debt to Humphrey Jennings, and the brief
appearance of the Queen Mother in London, at the unveiling of a statue,
alludes to her cameo in Jennings’s 1942 Listen for Britain.
If London doesn’t document quite the physical destruction depicted in
Jennings’s wartime films, it nevertheless reveals striking levels of dilapida-
tion. The Narrator deems the city ‘all waste’, and the camera lingers over
its decrepitude. It is, we are told:
under siege from a suburban government, which uses homelessness, pollu-

tion, and the most run-down and expensive transport system of any met-
ropolitan city in Europe as weapons against Londoners’ lingering desire for
the freedoms of city life.
Returning home after seven years working as ‘ship’s photographer’ on

board a cruise ship, he ‘is shocked by the increase in the number of peo-
ple sleeping out’ and by the population’s blasé attitude to IRA terrorism.
Both are presented as symptoms of a subtler, more cynical destructive-
ness: that of London’s civic cohesiveness and identity under the ‘one
party state’ of Conservative government, which Robinson sees as embod-
ying English culture’s supposed petty provincialism and antipathy to
cities in general. Indeed, such an attitude can be seen to have emerged
forcefully in the 1980s, during Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as Prime
Minister, and the reverberations of Thatcher’s laissez-faire, free-market
‘monetarist’ ideology—which, almost paradoxically, had its epicentre in
the historic financial district known as the City, with a capital C—form
the basis of what the Narrator calls the ‘problem of London.’
Throughout the 1980s, the socialist administrations of Britain’s cit-
ies had often been at odds with a national leader who had referred to
150 D. Anderson
‘the pursuit of equality’ as ‘a mirage’ and famously remarked that there

was ‘no such thing!’ as society (Thatcher 1975, Keay 1987). In 1985,
a report on urban deprivation by Archbishop Robert Runcie delineated
23 points where the government ‘was exhorted to improve its record
on housing, homelessness, child benefit and other forms of support for
children in poverty, and to support local councils grappling with inner-
city decay’ but was largely ignored (McSmith 2010, 223). Indeed, the
approach of politicians was cynical and destructive: the Greater London
Council was dissolved in 1986, its offices at County Hall redeveloped
as a hotel. The Conservative MP Dame Shirley Porter, meanwhile, was
busy decanting social tenants out of marginal wards in order to protect
a slim hold on power in the constituency of Westminster South (Cohen
1994). Porter was only found guilty of gerrymandering in 1996; in 1992
London was still ailing. As the geographer Andy Thornley declared in
his 1992 book The Crisis of London, the place was ‘a mess,’ crippled by
untenable increases in transport costs, growing discrepancies of income,
diminishment of the public realm and the development of ‘a fortress
mentality based upon fear’ (Thornley 1992, 4).
These concerns seem to have been paralleled by the problem of com-
prehending and representing the city—one that perhaps has deeper
roots. At one point, Robinson argues that just as London has become ‘a
city of fragments, no longer organised around the centre,’ it is now ‘too
thinly spread for anyone to know’. His turn of phrase is strikingly similar
to the urbanist Ruth Glass’s 1964 contention that London is ‘too vast,
too complex, too contrary and too moody to become entirely familiar’,
and that one of its chief problems ‘is that of incoherence’ (Glass 1964,
xxvii). It certainly pre-empts the diagnoses of critics like Julian Wolfreys,
who—looking backward from the new millennium—saw the London
of the 1990s as characterised by a sense of its ‘illimitable nature, and
the experience of this condition’ (2002, 193). Adrian Rifkin, likewise,
has also described the ‘figural problem’ of a city that appears to be con-
stantly in the process of losing itself ‘to a number of external discourses’
(1999, 621).
London processes these issues by bringing digressiveness into its
essence. While Keiller depicts scenes of homelessness, for instance, quite
directly (see, for instance, the shot of homeless men at Lincoln’s Inn
Fields in Fig. 1), his film also incorporates this other problem into both
its frame of discussion and its form. Robinson and the Narrator travel
Fig. 1 Homeless men at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London (1994)
(on foot) as far upriver as the Thames’s tidal limit at Teddington Lock;
they visit Joshua Reynolds’s house in Richmond just as they explore the
Docklands, Brent Cross shopping centre and beyond. The film is partly
‘about’ London, then, in this sense of moving or wandering about. At
the same time, the Narrator speaks in a tissue of quotations drawn from
diverse sources. He reads, for instance, the French poet Rimbaud’s 1886
prose poems ‘City’ and ‘Bridges’ (which were written in London) in full,
as well as Baudelaire’s ‘Anywhere out of the World,’ first published in
1869, declaring that ‘life is a hospital where each man is obsessed with
the desire of changing beds.’ At another point, Leicester Square is ‘imag-
inatively reconstructed as a monument to Laurence Sterne’—who is
then, in passing, credited ‘with the discovery of the cinema’ for his gloss
of John Locke’s idea of duration and ‘the succession of ideas’ as resem-
bling ‘the images in the inside of a lanthorn turned round by the heat of
a candle’ (Sterne 1985, 201). In fact, in the disparateness, whimsicality
152 D. Anderson
and frequent melancholy of these allusions, citations and digressions, the

film renders a city not unlike another memorable contention of Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy: the idea of the world as a ‘vile, dirty planet … made up
of the shreds and clippings of the rest’ (Sterne 1985, 40).
Robinson
These ‘shreds and clippings’ coalesce in the sensibility of their compiler:
Robinson is a dandyish misanthrope who apparently carries on a ‘bick-
ering, sexual relationship’ with the Narrator. He seems out of time and
out of place, a déclassé intellectual living in a council flat in Vauxhall
but enthusiastic about the nineteenth-century city as it was depicted by
French writers and artists. The number and variety of his enthusiasms
recalls both Baudelaire’s famous ‘painter of modern life’– ‘an “I” with
an insatiable appetite for the “non-I”’—as well as the sociologist Georg
Simmel’s idea that city life brings with it ‘a kind and an amount of per-
sonal freedom which has no analogy whatsoever under other conditions’
(Baudelaire 1964, 9; Simmel 1997, 184). Yet Robinson is oppressed by
1990s London. Although he often becomes an ‘enthusiastic flâneur’
when he is abroad, at home he often falls into sloughs of despondency.
Like Walter Benjamin, whose unfinished Arcades Project, composed
in Konvolut or ‘sheafs’ of quotations and observations, offers a structural
model for London, and who lived in a small apartment in Paris’s 15th
arrondissement before fleeing the Nazis in 1940, Robinson is trapped. In
a small flat, with few friends, London, for him, is an alienating ‘ant heap’
of a city, as the Narrator remarks, quoting the exiled Russian anarchist
Alexander Herzen. Herzen’s My Life and Thoughts is glossed parentheti-
cally in the Berlin Film Festival programme as ‘the motivating source which
prompted the making of the film’ (Keiller 1995, 54). Later, in a 2003 essay,
he called it merely ‘one of the starting points’, a variation typical of Keiller’s
subtle inconsistencies about the film’s genesis. A part-time lecturer in art
at the ‘University of Barking,’ Robinson lives in Vauxhall, we are told, out
of an enthusiasm for Sherlock Holmes. The precise connection remains
unclear, bearing out his apparent susceptibility to interpretative errors, but
his melancholic bent certainly recalls Holmes’s famous tendency to slumps
of ‘brown study’, just as the formal distinction between Robinson and the
Narrator also draws on that between Holmes and Dr. Watson.
Robinson’s characterisation develops on the maudlin and strangely

dignified first-person narrators of Keiller’s early short films, includ-
ing Stonebridge Park (1981) and Norwood (1983)—then voiced by the
director himself—with their involuted tales of petit-bourgeois crime and
meandering monochrome shots of indifferent suburban landscapes. At
the same time, ‘Robinson’ is, to some extent at least, a mask for the
filmmaker himself: throughout the film, we are invited to believe that
the ‘series of postcards of contemporary London’ Robinson is making
are the images we are seeing. As he and the Narrator travel about, his
attempts to practise ‘psychic landscaping,’ and ‘drifting’ clearly reflect
Keiller’s own interest in the Parisian Situationists of the 1950s and
1960s and their idea of ‘psychogeography’. As is borne out by Keiller’s
essays for Undercut magazine in the 1980s, this group had been a key
influence in London counterculture since Christopher Gray’s English
translation of various texts in the 1974 volume Leaving the Twentieth
Century.
Psychogeography, defined by chief Situationist theorist Guy Debord
(1955) as ‘the study of the precise laws of the geographical environment,
whether consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour
of individuals’, has a key role in London, playing into the fickleness and
bathetic sentiment that forms a counterpoint to Robinson’s melan-
choly. Indeed, his insights frequently suggest an alternative version of
the city, ‘imaginatively reconstructing’ it in terms of an alternative set
of memorials and waypoints which don’t necessarily correspond with
received wisdom or historical fact—just as Leicester Square is not gen-
erally regarded, in its entirety, as a monument to Laurence Sterne. For
instance, the Monument—the huge column commemorating the Great
Fire of London—appears at one point but receives no comment; the
easily missed ‘London Stone,’ meanwhile, a fragment nestled in a wall
by Cannon Street station (see Fig. 2), is harnessed to suggest the slim
possibility of renewed civic pride when Robinson designates the street
a ‘sacred’ one, and ‘the number 15 a sacred bus route’. Elsewhere,
Robinson is constantly diverted by the prospect of a civic ‘utopia,’ for
instance at the bandstand of the Boundary Estate in Shoreditch, a pio-
neering social housing development built in 1900 on the site of the once
notorious ‘Old Nicholl’ slum made famous by Arthur Morrison’s 1896
novel A Child of the Jago.
154 D. Anderson
Fig. 2 ‘London Stone’, nestled in a wall by Cannon Street station, in London

(1994)
Shipwreck
Keiller has described London, somewhat offhandedly, as a ‘joke about a
man who wishes London to be more like Paris’ (2012, 8). Robinson’s
enthusiasm for Rimbaud, Baudelaire and the Situationists bears this out,
but the comment also suggests that the ‘problem of London’ might, at
least partly, be a problem with himself. This is foregrounded during a
visit to Edgar Allan Poe’s school in Stoke Newington, and has to do with
the peculiar esteem in which Poe was held by European writers of the
nineteenth century: his short story ‘The Man of the Crowd,’ explicitly
set in London, fuelled its French translator Baudelaire’s theorisation of
‘the painter of modern life,’ and in turn the popular image of Paris as
the ‘capital of the modernity’. In the sense that it is about one man fol-
lowing another man through the city, it is also another formal model for
London.
The trip to Stoke Newington, then, is a pilgrimage. To Robinson’s

dismay, however, he finds that Poe’s school has been demolished, and
‘opposite, just across the road, was the house in which Daniel Defoe had
written Robinson Crusoe.’ The moment is one of despair:
Robinson was devastated by this discovery. He had gone looking for the
man of the crowd, and found instead shipwreck, and the vision of prot-
estant isolation. For weeks, he read long into the night until towards the
end of August he began to venture out again with the fresh eyes of the
convalescent.
This moment forms a crescendo. It was apparently unplanned by Keiller—

who shot the film in an exploratory manner, as an ‘essay’ or ‘trial’ in
Montaigne’s sense of the word, before composing the narrative around
it. The text’s reference to convalescence echoes the state of the narrator
in ‘The Man of the Crowd,’ also recovering from illness, who observes
specifically how ‘the film from the mental vision departs’ (Poe 2008, 84).
Perhaps Keiller was also aware that Benjamin formulated his own suicidal
thoughts of 1931 expressly in terms of being ‘a shipwrecked person, adrift
in the wreck’ (Barwell 1997, 160; Buck-Morss 1989, 37). In any case,
Robinson’s retreat to Vauxhall marks his confrontation not with the con-
tinental ‘freedoms of city life’ but with man as an island, and the figure
of whom Karl Marx wrote: ‘Necessity itself compels him to divide his
time with precision between his different functions … and having saved
a watch, ledger, ink and pen from the shipwreck, he soon begins, like a
good Englishman, to keep a set of books’ (Marx 1990, 169–170).
‘Necessity itself’ hardly bespeaks dandyism, decadence or ‘utopia,’
and Robinson is brought back to the ‘horror of home’ with a bump.
Yet such discords also occur constantly on a visual level: Keiller’s camera
takes in both established spectacle, like the Trooping of the Colour, as
well as odd things like the overlooked ‘World Time Today’ mechanical
map display in Piccadilly Circus Underground Station or the ripples of
rainwater in a puddle. This technique, following the ‘straight’ documen-
tary style associated with English Surrealist photographers like Tony Ray
Jones (and upon which Ian Walker has elaborated in his study So Exotic,
So Home Made, which takes its name from a phrase of the Narrator’s)
achieves an impression of composure and accident appearing to pun on
the Surrealist principle of ‘objective chance’ or hasard objectif—where
objectif can also mean ‘lens’. In fact, Keiller’s technique of composing
156 D. Anderson
the shots before composing a narrative around them turns the process of
filmmaking into a kind of primary ‘research’ in itself, and the camera into
an ‘instrument of criticism’ (Barwell 1997, 164; Keiller 2013, 81).
This methodology makes London peculiarly alive to the city’s shifting
physical fabric and social character, its unexpected juxtapositions in keep-
ing with Rimbaud’s description of a city ‘where all known taste has been
avoided’. Where Keiller’s camera replicates the perspectives of Monet’s
views of the Thames, for example (the extortionate price of his room
at the Savoy Hotel duly noted), it is equally drawn to a nearby poster
advertising the ‘Chippendales’ male stripper show. In this way, high
seriousness is constantly undercut by seediness and vulgarity, and the
condemnation of contemporary culture is counterbalanced with a will-
ingness to revel in its lurid decadence. In fact, it is through precisely this
discordance that London might well be thought of, like Rimbaud’s ‘City’
or ‘Bridges’‚ as a ‘prose poem’ itself: ‘musical without rhythm or rhyme,
supple and choppy enough to accommodate the lyrical movement of the
soul, the undulations of reverie, the bump and lurch of consciousness,’ as
Baudelaire put it in 1862 (Baudelaire 1997, 129).
Docklands
If Robinson is an urbanist swayed not so much by the ‘ebb and flow’
of the Baudelairean crowd as by the blips and dips of the free mar-
ket economy, then the film’s sequences in Docklands, an area deemed
by Thornley ‘the flagship for the Thatcherite approach to dealing with
London’s problems,’ are particularly interesting (1992, 8). Once the
heart of London’s imperial trade, by the 1980s Docklands had become
a vast, desolate space of industrial decay and poverty. Under Thatcher’s
administration, it had been set to become an emblem of urban renewal;
yet the governing ‘monetarist’ ideology meant that this did not follow a
socially enlightened path. In fact, the government’s creation of an ‘enter-
prise zone’ in the 1980s had effectively lifted all planning restrictions, and
forced state-owned companies to sell their land in the area, so that the
urban fabric became a peculiarly direct manifestation of free-market logic.
The result of this was often registered as disorientating. Iain Sinclair’s
1991 novel Downriver depicted the Isle of Dogs as the ‘Isle of Doges’
or ‘Vat City Plc’, a city-state owned by the Vatican and occupied, in a
nod to the association of Oswald Mosley’s fascists with the nearby Cable
Street riots of 1936, by ‘blackskirts’. Patrick Wright’s account in A Journey
Through Ruins: The Last Days of London, meanwhile, was more sober but
hardly less bizarre, describing lifelong Docklands residents who frequently
found themselves lost or confused as street names and layouts changed
rapidly and without warning (Wright 2009, 227). The two writers here
found themselves in unlikely accord with Prince Charles, whose 1989 anti-
modernist polemic A Vision of Britain described the tower at 1 Canada
Square, known metonymically as ‘Canary Wharf,’ as ‘a monument to the
wrong thinking of the 1960s, but built in the 1980s’ (Charles 1989, 54).
For Robinson, 1 Canada Square becomes significant only when the
development project falls into bankruptcy and stagnation, at which point
he acerbically deems the phallic edifice a monument to Rimbaud, who
had his own ‘bickering’ relationship with the poet Paul Verlaine dur-
ing his time in London. Keiller’s long-distance framing, which depicts
the tower emerging from a distant shrubbery, renders it absurd, but
the mood is nonetheless mournful: the stagnant tower seems to loom
as a marker of mismanaged speculation and hubris (see Fig. 3). In this
Fig. 3 The stagnant tower of 1 Canada Square in London (1994)

158 D. Anderson
it is akin to the idea of ‘ruins in reverse’ developed by the artist Robert

Smithson: by opting to see a half-finished building as a ruin—rather like
choosing to see a glass as half-empty rather than half-full—the artist is
able to adopt a mood of melancholic subjectivity and critical reflection
(Bowring 2008, 196). In this way, Canary Wharf becomes a twin to the
City office block devastated by an IRA bomb, with its window blinds
fluttering in the wind. The moments recall Gustave Doré’s famous 1872
etching in which an imaginary ‘New Zealander’ regards the future ruins
of London, offering the viewer chance to ruminate on the passing of
time and the ephemerality of status and power (Doré 2004, 98).
Outmodedness
London comes to an abrupt close, with the Narrator stating ‘the
next morning I woke at 5.30’ and an intertitle announcing the date:
‘December 9th, 1992.’ The sudden disappearance of Robinson and the
Narrator, which amounts to a kind of vanishing act, is fitting: shortly
beforehand, Robinson has reflected on London itself as ‘the first metrop-
olis to disappear.’ The moment, shot from the portico of the Royal
Exchange, is as apparently dispiriting as a slightly earlier scene of bon-
fire night on Kennington Common, where the melancholy strains of a
late string quartet by Beethoven seems to mourn not only Guy Fawkes’s
failed attempt on power in 1605, but also, more subtly, the failed
Chartist uprising of 1848, which occurred on the same site.
Such moments might indicate a wholesale condemnation of the city.
Indeed, in their essay on London, Laura Rascaroli and Ewa Mazierska
take this view, arguing that ‘Keiller’s overall opinion of London’s pre-
sent is negative’, and misquoting the film along the way (Rascaroli and
Mazierska 2006, 61). In fact, the film’s attitude is much more ambiva-
lent. As Keiller himself declared in 1997, London constituted an attempt
‘to make anew, to rediscover, to reconstruct’ the city, ‘and reveal it as
a place which might be in the wrong hands but is not irredeemable’
(Barwell 1997, 165). Scenes of the Notting Hill Carnival, of Diwali
being celebrated in Southall, or the hubbub of Ridley Road market in
Dalston, certainly depict lively social interaction worth defending and are
at odds with the idea of the city as an alienating ‘ant heap.’ This ambiva-
lence is in key with Robinson’s unconventional longings and the subtle-
ties of his nostalgia. He mourns Gilbert Scott’s red telephone boxes not
for their iconic appearance, we note, but for ‘the smell of cigarette ash
and urine that used to linger.’
This is not the straightforward longing of texts like The London Nobody
Knows, Geoffrey Fletcher’s 1960 book—which generated a 1969 docu-
mentary starring James Mason—cataloguing fading fragments of the city
and mourning the way certain areas had ‘degenerated’ (Fletcher 1962,
55). In fact, the contrast illuminates London’s potency. If Fletcher’s work,
pining for some lost golden age, appeals to what the theorist Svetlana
Boym has referred to as ‘restorative’ mode of nostalgia, then what we
find in London is somewhat more akin to her idea of an alternate, ‘reflec-
tive’ nostalgia. This, she writes, would be a ‘sideways’ nostalgia, char-
acterised by a practice of ‘lingering,’ and proceeding in a mode that is
‘ironic, inconclusive and fragmentary’ (Boym 2001, 41). London’s patch-
work structure, experimental, essayistic method and melancholy sub-
jectivity mark its allegiance to this mode. The subtle positivity here also
brings the film into line with the transition that Boym describes between
the nineteenth-century and late-twentieth-century nostalgic: if the former
‘dreamed of escape from the city into the unspoiled landscape’, then the
latter is ‘the urban dweller who feels that the city itself is an endangered
landscape’ (Boym 2001, 80). It is for this reason that the use of the cam-
era as an ‘instrument of criticism’ is not wholly pejorative. As Keiller has
pointed out, ‘the whole point of making the film is rather optimistic in
that the idea is to make everybody value the place’ (Barwell 1997, 165).
The film’s complex, layered sense of untimeliness is integral to this sub-
merged optimism. Rascaroli and Mazierska’s criticism of London is based
on the apparently radical idea of the flâneur (Robinson) as a ‘bygone fig-
ure.’ In fact, the affectation of outmodedness was central to this figure
even in nineteenth-century Paris—as Benjamin remarked, for the flâneur
‘far-off times and places interpenetrate the landscape and the present
moment’ (Benjamin 2002, 419). It is also in keeping with London’s docu-
mentary form. After all, as Julian Stallabrass has recently argued:
If in the early 1990s you had predicted that documentary work would
come to make up a large and influential strand of contemporary art, the
idea would have seemed absurd. It would have been said that documentary
had surely had its day, perishing with the liberal politics that had nourished
it; and along with it, naïve ideas about humanitarian reform and the ability
of visual representation to capture reality. (Stallabrass 2013, 12)
160 D. Anderson
In fact, both Robinson and London should properly be regarded in

terms of a deliberate outmodedness, aligning with the presentation of
the city itself as a forlorn, decaying space, and this actually contributes
to the shadowy possibility of a radical change in its fabric. In this respect
the film is attuned to Benjamin’s comments on ‘the revolutionary ener-
gies that appear in the “outmoded”’ within Surrealism (Benjamin 2007,
181), where a focus on the unfashionable or passé reveals the mutabil-
ity of taste and culture, estranging the contemporary and revealing its
instability. As Keiller’s camera travels around the city seeking out the for-
gotten, the overlooked and the worn out, his film also cultivates utopian
possibilities: for humanitarian reform or even revolution; for the aes-
theticisation of everyday life; for the solution thereby to the ‘problem of
London’.
Today, this veiled radicalism is doubly obscured by the patina of age,
where ‘restorative’ nostalgia threatens to seep into the ‘reflective’. In the
2003 essay ‘London in the Early 1990s’, Keiller repeated many of the
formulations of the original 1994 Berlin Film Festival programme, yet
he placed the word ‘decline’ into distancing quotation marks—‘the film
set out to document, among other things, the “decline” of London
under the Tories’ (Keiller 2013, 85). The shift should alert us to the risk
of film becoming an object of uncritical nostalgia and remind us that its
energies should be harnessed for a critical urbanism of the present. Yet
it also highlights how ambivalent the film really is about its subject—
‘rather critical’, certainly, but a profoundly sympathetic portrait of the
city and its emblematically alienated citizen.
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McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.
——— 2007. Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz. New York:
Schocken.
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Oxford: Oxford University Press.
From Dogpower to Ratropolis: London
in Animated Film
Rui Tang and David Whitley
What does the animated feature film tradition contribute distinctively to

the long history of cinema’s engagement with London? In terms of their
meaningful exploration of London as a distinctive space and setting, do
mainstream feature animations offer anything beyond a kind of ‘London
lite’, recycling standard tropes in pastiche forms, within melodramas
blended with comic gags? And, given that the majority of animated
features are produced by US companies with a particular orientation
towards US audiences, to what extent do they probe beneath the stereo-
typical trappings of the tourist gaze? In pursuing these questions here in
relation to three exemplary films, we want to bring into focus two dimen-
sions that are particularly distinctive to animation: the casting of principal
protagonists in animal form; and the cinematic representation of urban
space through the medium of drawings (whether in the form of painted
cells or CGI-derived images). These aspects are so obviously founda-
tional to the animated medium that they are often overlooked within
film analyses that concentrate on content or assumed parallels with live
action genres set in London. Yet it is these most obvious characteristics,
R. Tang · D. Whitley (*) 
e-mail: daw36@cam.ac.uk

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64979-5_12
164 R. Tang and D. Whitley
we want to argue, that enable a distinctive viewpoint on this frequently

filmed capital city to be developed within animated features. The three
films we will be focusing on in some detail were each produced some two
decades apart from each other between 1961 (Disney’s 101 Dalmatians)
and 2006 (Aardman/DreamWorks’ Flushed Away). The middle film in
the sequence we will examine, The Great Mouse Detective, was released
in 1986, but this pastiche of the classic Sherlock Holmes narratives is
set in London of the late Victorian period. Although all three films play
strongly to stereotypes, what London signifies is rendered both familiar
and strange as it is re-drawn—literally—from the animal protagonists’
viewpoints. In the process, we want to argue, the films not only recycle
stock elements within the hybridised genre forms that animation typically
revels in; they also rehearse some of the major cultural anxieties of the
respective periods within which they were produced, particularly relating
to changing pressures on identity and consumption.
The dramatisation of anxieties relating to identity and consumption
(which are inevitably intensified within the setting of a metropolis) is per-
haps most obvious in the most recent film in the sequence we will be
examining, Flushed Away. But this is already a disturbing theme in the
earliest of these films, too, Disney’s 1961 101 Dalmatians, though its
force is contained here through a cosy, nostalgically conservative staging
of London. The opening credits of 101 Dalmatians evoke the reassur-
ingly familiar London of tourist guidebooks by showing the city’s iconic
landmarks—including a double-decker bus, red telephone booth, the
River Thames, Big Ben and the Tower Bridge—all rendered in attractive,
conventional forms. This safe, nostalgic London provides the backdrop
for the romantic comedy and homebuilding of paired humans and dogs
in the opening sections of the film, before Cruella de Ville’s whirlwind
intrusion injects a counterpoint of grotesque caricature into the bur-
geoning domestic idyll. Even at this point, though, there is barely a hint
of the ‘dark London’ imagery reprised from Sherlock Holmes’s stamp-
ing grounds in The Great Mouse Detective. The default imagery of the
city remains reassuringly safe and comfortably middle-class, even after
Cruella’s puppy-skinning obsession threatens to disrupt it. The main
threat to the aggregated family of Dalmatians that Cruella steals to turn
into fur coats is thus conducted at an isolated site, well removed from
the city. The idiosyncratic features of the city itself in 101 Dalmatians,
toned in the drawings’ delicate, pastel colours ‘that catches the English
light in a manner similar to the English water-colour school’ (Allan
FROM DOGPOWER TO RATROPOLIS: LONDON IN ANIMATED FILM 165
1999, 238), are rendered as relatively serene, imbued with a quirkily

English, idyllic charm. London is thus allowed to remain a romanticised
space evoking peaceful and leisurely paced lives, full of familial warmth,
parks, home fires and animal love—a kind of urban pastoral retreat that
will act as a safe haven for the animal protagonists’ return, once the
threat represented by Cruella has been dispelled.
This romanticised London is mostly configured through the view-
points of the Dalmatian brood, who, though heavily anthropomor-
phised, retain nuances of their canine behaviours. In her reading of
Dodie Smith’s novel on which the Disney film is based, Margaret Blount
(1974) draws attention to the conceit of the dogs being depicted as a
more intelligent breed than humans: the world in 101 Dalmatians ‘is
given over to Dog Power’ (271). This conceit is carried over into the
animated version, which frames ‘Dog Power’ within the dog’s voiceo-
ver narration at the outset, Pongo calling his human owner, Roger,
his ‘old pet’, covertly taking charge of Roger’s life as his matchmaker.
Nevertheless, this dogdom of superior beings, as observed by Imelda
Whelehan (1999), is modelled on a human society imbued with ‘con-
servative messages about solid and timeless social values’ (216).
Particularly, we want to emphasise here that the film repositions the
natural social instincts of the dog pack—especially their instinct to coop-
erate in securing primary needs for food and self-preservation—into its
evocation of a pleasant, stable physical and social space of the middle
class within an idyllic London. This is mostly epitomised by the terraced
house the protagonists live in, imaged as a warm love nest for the mar-
ried life of humans and dogs, and including a live-in nanny who services
the needs of both. Within this upper-middle-class idyll, the dogs and
humans act as self-reflexive mirrors to each other, both woven into a dis-
course of domesticity, maternity and traditional gender roles, that rein-
forces a conservative norm of marriage and family. And the immediate
environs of the house, particularly the nearby roads and Regent’s Park
where the dogs often take a walk, are also stylised as a charming English
middle-class world of ease and harmony, crossed only by the light ten-
sions of a comedy of manners, which echoes the cosiness of the domestic
space. There is no real social contestation or sign of any fundamentally
disruptive force in this green North London world, where the natural
energies of comic disorder are fully contained within a vernal backdrop
of Regent’s Park that imbues a kind of ‘a dateless quality’ to the drama
(Whelehan 1999, 221).
Conflicts arise when the dogs’ comfortably middle-class lives are

threatened by Cruella’s rampant and apparently unstoppable desire to
turn the Dalmatians into luxury commodities. Jack Zipes has suggested
that in early Disney features ‘evil is always associated with female nature
out of control’ (1988, 44), and here Cruella epitomises this tradition of
hysterical, uncontrollable women positioned in deviant opposition to
patriarchal norms of femininity. In this instance, more than a simple ste-
reotype is given life force, however. Cruella manifests an energy of an
altogether different order, which one might see as metonymic of the
threat to social cohesion that was already beginning to be perceived in
the post-war drive towards more unfettered forms of consumerism from
the late 1950s onwards. Indeed, the film more than once obliquely ref-
erences a more energised, but less socially stable, mode of intensified
consumption whose unsettling influence is captured with a mild satirical
note. This is evidenced in a small way near the start of the film, when
Pongo, scouting for a mate for his too settled bachelor owner Roger,
spots an attractive woman on the street whose dress sense matches the
overly coutured poodle that accompanies her. ‘Much too fancy’, avers
Pongo, with a note of disapproval for the excessive display of wealth
showcased in the grooming of both human and dog. Another observa-
tion, with a hint of criticism, is subtly directed towards the ubiquity of
television commercials, indicated through product placement in the TV
drama the Dalmatians are watching. However, the most manifest threat
is posed by Cruella herself, in whose eyes the Dalmatians are reduced
to material for fur coats. The animation caricatures Cruella as a female
grotesque with fashionably elongated body, hysterical laughter, brash
arrogance and trailing cigarette ash—the antithesis of familial domestic-
ity. Cruella’s mania for fast driving, fashion and luxury types her as an
uncontrollable woman, whose unrestrained aggression in pursuing her
desires threatens the cohesion of family and class which is the film’s
moral touchstone (see Fig. 1). She mocks the couple’s unostentatious
house and lifestyle, challenging the norms of that comfortable world
with her stylishly grotesque drive and energies.
It is notable that, in this world defined by ‘Dog Power’, it is the soli-
darity of the canine, rather than the human, community that resists the
high-octane, consumption fuelled challenge to the conservative order of
the post-war establishment. Indeed, the ‘twilight bark’ sequence—where
a variety of dogs across London and the nearby countryside join in a
concerted effort to find the lost puppies before they are killed—implicitly
Fig. 1 Cruella’s car—emblem of ostentatious consumption in 101 Dalmations

(1961)
cuts across class as well as metropolitan–rural boundaries. It starts from

Regent’s Park, where Pongo barks to send the initial message, and is first
picked up in Hampstead, where the Great Dane answers with a more
booming utterance. Then, as dogs of various types and class affinities
relay the call from different locations, the message is transmitted across
London’s streets, conduits, houses and shops till it reaches the surround-
ing countryside, where the puppies are being held. The nostalgic con-
figuration of London as a distinctive film space thus serves as a unifying
image that encompasses a whole ethos of national identity. By imagin-
ing dogs—and even a cat and horse—joining together in an enterprise
of resistance and rescue that cuts across their differences in type, status
and affiliation to social groups, this sequence suggests a return to older
collective values that are now under pressure, evoking a sense of commu-
nity and solidarity between—as well as within—social classes. The names
of Captain, Sergeant and Colonel—and the mannerisms of these three

animal characters especially—indicate military bearing, recalling wartime
unity in defeat of a common enemy. When the puppies are finally rescued
and the warm haven restored, the continued efficacy of this collective
ideal, now under pressure from a more rapacious version of consumer-
ism, is also tacitly reasserted.
If a nostalgic image of London is deployed to dispel threats to a cohe-
sive post-war identity in 101 Dalmatians, then, by contrast, the sense of
vulnerability to threat would seem to be played up through the animal
protagonists in The Great Mouse Detective, produced by Disney some
twenty-five years later, at a time when a neoliberal orthodoxy was tak-
ing hold in both Britain and America. Loosely based on the tales of
Sherlock Holmes, with the eponymous hero transformed into a mouse,
the London period setting now emphasises underlying threat to the
established order on a much wider scale and is distinctly less reassuring.
Charles Viney (1999) has suggested that ‘the Sherlock Holmes stories
are, essentially, London stories’ (7), but Holmes’s London has at once
‘a romantic atmosphere’ (Williams 1973, 227) and ‘the mood of the sin-
ister city’ (Lee 2014, 184)—where a complacent establishment order is
continually threatened by unseen forces in its underworld. The reconfig-
uration of this threat within a comic melodrama aimed at children, with
animal protagonists, obviously requires some radical adaption in terms
of tone, with traditional tropes of the fin-de-siècle city at the high point
of Britain’s imperial power both pastiched and redeployed in some quite
distinctive ways. Recognisable images of period London—as shrouded in
pea soup fog, with horse-drawn cabs clip-clopping down gaslit labyrin-
thine streets and great wealth in co-existence with grinding poverty—are
re-circulated and, to some extent, re-cast in The Great Mouse Detective.
In this animated adaption, the London landscape is invested with rec-
ognisable, stock period features, but these are further stylised as exag-
gerated caricature so that the space of ‘dark London’ (Tuan 1985, 56)
within which criminal activity is half concealed is both heightened and
disarmed through comedy.
Nevertheless, animation not only recirculates familiar images from the
adapted tales but is also capable of investing the London landscape with
additional dimensions and meanings. In his discussion of animated adap-
tion, Paul Wells (1999) has pointed out that, unlike a live action film
which ‘merely literalises and fixes’, animation ‘simultaneously literalises
and abstracts’ when adapting a literary text, and this is because animation
resorts to bringing out ‘the intended “feeling” of the text through

its very abstractness in the use of colour, form and movement’ (208).
Here it should be noticed that in conveying the ‘literariness’ of a text,
the expressivity of the animated images speaks more to the ‘emotional’,
than the ‘real’ as in live action (Wells 1999, 208). Wells’ theorisation
of animated adaptation is highly applicable in reading The Great Mouse
Detective, as the film frequently employs colour scheme and caricatured
form to bring out the ambience of ‘dark London’, within which crimes
highlight social divisions and a social order with precarious foundations
that are continually being undermined. This is especially reflected by
the film’s manipulation of the city’s iconic weather. Charlotte Brunsdon
(2007) observes that, apart from its iconic landscapes and buildings,
‘cinematic London also has identifying weather: rain and fog’. She rec-
ognises these as familiar images that constitute a form of London land-
mark (45); indeed, night-time scenes of damp and swirling fog seem to
have a special charm in the popular imagination for melodramas staged
in turn-of-the-century London (Barefoot 2016; Corton 2015). This
effect is heightened through pastiche and caricature in The Great Mouse
Detective. In the opening sequence before the film’s credits, for instance,
a sentimental scene in which the child mouse Olivia is given an enchant-
ing clockwork toy by her craftsman father is cross-cut with dark, damp
and foggy street scenes that register the advance of a grotesque, caped,
peg-legged, limping bat, who turns out to be one of the major villains.
In the ensuing scene, the bat breaks violently into the child’s domestic
space, appearing with a terrifying sadistic grin that fills the whole of the
casement window, before abducting the child mouse’s father. The melo-
dramatic device of creating excitement and fear through configuring the
child’s comfortable home space as radically unsafe is not uncommon in
children’s narratives (and has parallels in 101 Dalmatians). But this scene
is distinguished both by the ferocity of the imagery, which the cartoon
mode renders safer through its caricatured distance, and the weather
imagery, within which the extreme threat is simultaneously atmospheri-
cally evoked and pictorially cloaked. The fog which has shrouded the bat
figure in mystery on his approach is used as a motif to encircle the whole
cinematic frame as the scene fades into the opening credits, suggest-
ing a symbolic function for London’s fog that is not unlike the imagery
Dickens deploys so brilliantly and pervasively in Our Mutual Friend
(1865). Here, though, the fog imagery conveys a highly charged feeling
of eerie menace aroused by what is concealed and corrupt in the ‘dark
London’ streets, but also helps shield the child viewer from a horror that
would be untenable in a more realistic form.
There is a similar doubleness about the way social divisions within
‘dark London’ and fracture lines between official and criminal culture
are negotiated. The particular point we would like to explore here,
though, is how the film’s device of anthropomorphic animals oper-
ates as ‘an essential component of the language of animation’, that can
both give heightened representation to and obscure social issues within
human society (Wells 2009, 2). In the film the evil force which threat-
ens the society of mice is mostly epitomised by Ratigan, a fierce rat who
is a criminal mastermind, abetted by bat and cat accomplices, who obey
his orders. Within the logic of the film, predatory relationships between
animals and disparities between species’ physical power are exploited for
potentially horrifying effect, which is mitigated by the comedic gags and
caricatured lack of realism. In Ratigan’s ludicrously implausible attempt
to seize overall power in Britain by substituting a mechanical model of
the Queen, there is a scene where the real Mouse Queen is fed alive to
the villain cat. In another sequence, a mouse protagonist is proffered
to the cat to devour because he has insulted Ratigan by attributing his
‘real’ animal identity of rat to him. Divisions between animal species
clearly replicate divisions between human social groups seeking power or
security, and the animality of Ratigan and his accomplices, in particular,
encodes the dangers of collapse of the established political order into car-
toon form; but the dramatisation of such divisions using animals’ pred-
atory instincts in a context that mixes mock horror with carnivalesque
play takes this beyond being simply metaphorical. In a sense, the liter-
ary unease felt in Holmes’ London through the pervasive threat of its
dark, criminal Other is translated into a parallel fantasy within which
animal instincts and human conflicts over power merge. In the process,
the multiple cinematic meanings of London become refracted through
animal forms, as well as through the distorted mirror of a dark criminal
underside. By translating that criminal underside into animal typologies
and behaviours, an expressively heightened but simplified form of repre-
senting threat to social order is enabled, wherein the complexity of issues
about race, religious politics, social taboos and so forth are both magni-
fied and recast for more oblique, comedic forms of engagement.
Like the other films we have explored here, Flushed Away also uses
London as a backdrop to stage a criminal threat to the established
order. But here the issue of consumption and identity is returned to in
more complex and pervasive ways than in 101 Dalmatians. Unlike 101
Dalmatians, which stylises a London landscape of nostalgic reassur-
ance and charm, Flushed Away opts for a contemporary metropolitan
setting where British fashions, entertainments and pop culture are dis-
played as a mélange of post-Blairite cool Britannia. Like other animated
renditions of the city, the film begins with a series of touristic shots of
familiar landmarks to establish the London location—including Big Ben,
Tower Bridge, the River Thames and red buses. The distinctive texture
of the CGI production, enhanced by the pulse of an up-to-date music
soundtrack, invests these stock, touristic-gaze images with a contem-
porary energy and feel. The vibrant mood is further enhanced by an
anachronistic shot of advertising boards at Piccadilly Circus, showcas-
ing the 1966 World Cup, complete with Union Jacks and the slogan of
‘Go England’. Similarly to The Great Mouse Detective, Flushed Away also
imagines a secret world of anthropomorphic rodents living in London,
though no longer with the trappings of Empire. Characteristically mixing
real animal habitats with metaphorical analogies, the rats in Flushed Away
mostly inhabit underground sewers, where they build, using human
junk, a miniature London that mimics the one above the ground, with
its recognisable landmarks and modern-day institutions—a scaled-down,
hidden metropolitan society running in parallel with that populated by
human beings above. The familiar landmarks that appear in the film’s
opening are all echoed in a later sequence offering a panoramic view of
this underground Ratropolis, where one can spot Big Ben, Piccadilly
Circus, Tower Bridge, red buses and telephone booths, all of which are
built from the discarded detritus of a consumer society: old clothes, bev-
erage cans, paper, tin boxes, used tires, discarded household appliances
and so forth (see Fig. 2). A familiar London landscape is therefore play-
fully re-appropriated and re-experienced through this comic parody, as
the rodents creatively reconstruct the metropolis-like inspired freecyclers.
By showcasing the pervasiveness of human junk in the underground
sewers of London in alternative, creative forms like this, the film seems
to resist any simple polarisation of the city into a surface, establishment
order and dark underlying forces that threaten this. The two realms are
clearly positioned in symbiotic relation to each other, even if there seems
to be an implicit sign of tensions in representing a vibrant underclass that
is dependent on the waste products of an affluent society.
This Ratropolis not only copies the physical look of London, but also
mirrors the social dimension of its human society, most evident in the
Fig. 2 The alternative London—built around underground sewers rather than

the Thames—in Flushed Away (2006)
microcosm’s duplication of British social class division and hierarchy.

Rodents that epitomise and caricature all walks of life can be spotted
on the underground city’s bustling streets, and the four main charac-
ters, in particular, are configured with stereotypical British social class
characteristics: upper class; royal nobility; streetwise lower class; and an
extrovert cockney who loves football and pub-going. The film’s rep-
resentation of the social identities dramatised in this class-contested
space, we would argue, is imbricated within a consumerist culture that
is central to contemporary urban life. We would also argue that animals
in this animation, particularly Roddy and The Toad in their respective
roles as pets—serve as the critical images that engage with key issues of
consumption and identity, identifiable in two major ways. The condi-
tions within which Roddy and The Toad are raised, for instance, reflect a
trend in consumer society whereby pets are commodified as consumable
artefacts, in a mode similar to the problematic dimensions of toy own-

ership explored in the Toy Story trilogy (cf. Lanier et al. 2013; Jaques
2015). Unlike most other rodents in the film, who earn their own liv-
ings in the sewers of the underground city, Roddy is kept in a delicate
golden cage in a luxury apartment located in the affluent borough of
Kensington. Within these privileged confines, Roddy is spoiled by his
owner with rich food, expensive toys and fine clothes. The Toad also
once enjoyed a cossetted life as the royal pet of Prince Charles. By posi-
tioning the animals as in receipt of lavish proxy lifestyles, the film enables
these pets to be seen as symbols of wealth and status, showcasing their
owners’ ability to create identities based on luxury goods. On another
level, as anthropomorphic characters whose problematic identities are
sites of critical reflection, these creatures’ responses to the luxury con-
sumer goods that define them can be seen as satirising consumer-based
ideologies, albeit ambivalently. The Toad is fervently obsessed with col-
lecting and displaying artefacts associated with the royal family in order
to show his ‘good taste’ and to retain his identity as a royal pet. Similarly,
Roddy is discriminating in attire and carefully groomed. He particu-
larly likes to imitate the glamorous looks of James Bond, an iconic fig-
ure whose distinctively upper-class, British identity has been fashioned,
according to critics, so that it speaks to urban fantasies of affluent con-
sumerism (Denning 2009; Gilligan 2011; Nitins 2011). Flushed Away
displays a series of close shots in which Roddy dresses for a date in classic
Bond style, with exquisitely tailored, black dinner-suit, immaculate dress-
shirt, and tastefully expensive cufflinks. Roddy’s projected holiday offers
a full schedule of elite recreational activities, such as skiing, polo, golf,
and film premieres, which are also referenced in Bond films and ‘have
the glamour of being the sports of the wealthy’ (Denning 2009, 63).
Thus a distinctive brand of high-end consumerism defines the imagined
class identities of both major protagonists. These class identities are pro-
jected as fragile and illusory in the film, however, providing the narrative
with a critical edge. The animal characters are themselves positioned as
commodities as well as consumers, imbued with a fleeting awareness of
their consumer-tagged identities as precariously built on shallow, shifting
foundations.
The film’s questioning of consumerism in contemporary London
(representative of urban society more generally) centres on encroaching
feelings of loneliness, alienation and emptiness experienced by Roddy.
Though spoiled by luxury living, he feels shallow rather than genuinely

happy. The lavish but cold cage in which he lives becomes a metaphor for
entrapment within consumerism in real-life settings: a cage which takes
people captive in the illusion of happiness built of commodities—glamor-
ous to look at but lifeless inside. The film tries to resolve this problem by
gravitating towards traditional values of love, friendship and family values
that are repeatedly expressed in American mainstream animations. This
is evoked by romanticising the underground, replica London—where
Roddy becomes intimate with Rita, a lower-class rat with whom he later
develops a cross-class romance—as poor but full of excitement. Roddy
gradually learns to enjoy the familial warmth of Rita’s boisterous, work-
ing-class, extended family. The film’s resolution of the tensions engen-
dered by class division, elite separation and consumer-based identities is
in many ways conventional: a rom com in which the alienated rich boy
is restored to contact with the real pulse of life through contact with a
working-class community and love for a downtown girl. Yet the film,
with its more complex evocation of a double London and the nuances
brought into focus from animal characterisation, opens up some more
subtle critical perspectives on consumerist urban society, too.
Thus, from mid-twentieth century idyllic haven, to fin-de-siècle dark
space, and finally to cool Britannia of the twenty-first century, each of the
three animated feature films under discussion here works through con-
ventional iconography to express some of the tensions particularly prom-
inent in specific historical periods. While these films recycle many stock
images in their staging of London as romanticised, stereotypically British,
tourist spectacle, their engagement with London’s distinctive geography,
history and architecture within the specific language of animation ena-
bles some different perspectives on the capital. In particular, the reset-
ting of realist landscape conventions within a range of fantasy devices,
combined with the estranging power of perspectives from anthropo-
morphic animals, enable playful, carnivalesque distortions of traditional
ways of imagining this all-too-familiar city. In the process, and within an
apparently conventional animation aesthetic, the films foreground certain
fracture lines and social anxieties underlying the ebullient, comforting
resolution of their plotlines. As Paul Wells notes, animated animals are
‘able to carry a diversity of representational positions’ (2009, 3), and the
fluid movement between these positions opens up gaps, where tensions
can both be given hyperbolic expression and played with, relatively safely.
While all the films in the end conform to a happy ending and reassurance
of mainstream social norms and beliefs, the affordances of animation
enable a critical stance to flicker in and out of view, giving comic shape
to the often ambivalent energies of urban life, seen within the distinctive
ambience of the multifaceted London settings.
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Skateboard City: London
in Skateboarding Films
Iain Borden
In popular imagery, skateboarding is directly correlated with southern

California surfing. Renowned documentaries like Dogtown and Z-Boys
(2001) and Chlorine (2003), plus Hollywood movies like Back to the
Future (1985), Gleaming the Cube (1989) and Lords of Dogtown (2005)
all show blond-haired skateboarders riding against a backdrop of palm
trees and clear blue skies.
Yet skateboarding is far from being entirely Californian. Even in the
earliest days of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Florida and Australia
were major skateboarding centres, along with cities in Britain, France,
Germany and Brazil—and, unsurprisingly, London has long been part
of this history. Important 1970s skateboard sites in the capital included
public parks like Kensington Gardens and Crystal Palace, along with
purpose-built skateparks such as Mad Dog Bowl (Old Kent Road),
Meanwhile Gardens (Westbourne Park), Rolling Thunder (Brentford),
Rom (Hornchurch), Skatecircus (Wandsworth Road), Skate City (Tooley
Street), Solid Surf (Harrow) and Stockwell (Brixton), plus, since the
I. Borden (*) 
University College London, London, UK
e-mail: i.borden@ucl.ac.uk

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64979-5_13
178 I. Borden
1990s, appropriated terrains like those around Shell Centre, Bishopsgate

and St Paul’s. And from the early 1970s onwards, the Southbank’s
‘Undercroft’ (beneath Queen Elizabeth Hall) has been another major
location, sometimes referred to as UK skateboarding’s Garden of Eden
(Borden 2015).
This chapter charts London skateboarding as captured through dif-
ferent forms of moving image, disclosing a vibrant scene of national and
international repute. In doing so, I raise wider sub-themes, ranging from
architectural design, historic preservation, cognitive mapping and public
space to creative industries, social diversity, neoliberalism and globalisa-
tion (Borden 2001). Changing technologies in skateboarding docu-
mentations, from television and conventional filmmaking to commercial
videos, amateur camcorder projects and contemporary social media are
also registered.
False Dawn
In 1965 Londoner Roy Giles wrote to American magazine The Quarterly
SkateBoarder to extol the virtues of UK skateboarding, centred on the
capital and surfing centres like St Ives in Cornwall and Langland Bay in
South Wales. The British public also learned about this new phenom-
enon from the national press, Popular Mechanics and Life, films like
the Academy Award-nominated Skaterdater (1965) and Canadian The
Devil’s Toy (1966); or from British Pathé news features at local cinemas.
Celebrities also joined in, and both singer Tom Jones and Conservative
Party Leader Edward Heath were photographed skateboarding in
London settings, with Heath’s precarious attempts in Kensington’s
Camden House Terrace being captured by ITN (‘Tory Leader’).
Despite this worldwide reach, the nascent skateboard bubble quickly
burst. By the end of 1965, American skateboard manufacturers like
Makaha suffered cancelled orders worth hundreds of thousands of dollars,
and as Dick Metz of Hobie skateboards explained, ‘for two or three years
you couldn’t hardly give a skateboard away’ (Marcus and Griggi, 55).
Halcyon Days
In the early to mid-1970s skateboarding boomed again. Fuelled by tech-
nological advancements in the form of polyurethane wheels, purpose-
designed trucks and kicktail decks, and inspired by short-board surfing
SKATEBOARD CITY: LONDON IN SKATEBOARDING FILMS 179
innovations, skateboarding took off dramatically; as Dogtown and Z

Boys shows, Californian skaters rode up schoolyard banks and swim-
ming pool walls, as well as concrete reservoirs, pipes and ditches.
New magazines were launched (including the incredibly popular
US SkateBoarder in 1975), purpose-built skateparks arose in New
Zealand, Australia and the USA, and enthusiastically received docu-
mentaries included the Australian Ultimate Flex Machine (1975) and
American Spinn’in Wheels (1975), Magic Rolling Board (1976), Blaze
On (1978) and Skateboard Madness (1979). The BBC travelled to
California for its Skateboard Kings documentary for The World About
Us (1978), providing many London skaters with their first moving
images of Tony Alva and other famous ‘Dogtown’ (Venice Beach)
skateboarders.
British and London skateboarding was also being reborn. By 1975,
American manufacturer Bahne was frantically fulfilling UK and world-
wide orders; in 1976, UK retail was led by London’s Slick Willies
American Store on Kensington High Street and Alpine Sports on
Brompton Road, while a year later Britain’s Morris Vulcan was pro-
ducing 15,000 boards every week (Marcus and Griggi, 55, 120–123).
London-based publications like Skateboard!, Skateboard Special and
Skateboard News appeared, rapidly joined by competitions organised
by the London Evening News (August 1977), the BBC’s ‘Nationwide’
programme (late 1977), and The Sun (May–September 1978), plus
sundry coverage in national print, television and film media. A four-
day National Skateboard Show was held in February 1978 at the
Royal Horticultural Halls, with elaborate displays from equipment
manufacturers and skatepark constructors (‘National Skateboard
Show’). The same year, Prince Charles was filmed visiting the com-
munity ‘Talacre’ skatepark—part of the progressive Inter-Action
social initiative on a Kentish Town bombsite on the corner of Talacre
Road and Prince of Wales Road—and even taking cautious rides in
his heeled shoes, blazer and tie (‘HRH The Prince of Wales Visit to
Inter-Action’).
That London was now a major skateboarding centre is nowhere
more evident than in Richard Gayer’s Hot Wheels ‘n’ Big Deals (1978).
Supporting box-office hit Grease, Hot Wheels (as the film is commonly
known) was seen by hundreds of thousands of UK movie-goers. To
begin with, the twenty-minute documentary shows skateboarding in
180 I. Borden
Trafalgar Square, Covent Garden, Portobello Road, Undercroft, Crystal

Palace and Hyde Park, along with a demonstration by US Hobie team
riders and others at Islington’s Michael Sobell Centre. Where Hot
Wheels triumphs is in its treatment of the Meanwhile Gardens commu-
nity-based skatepark and, in particular, of the much more grandiose
Skate City commercial facility. Although lasting barely a year—built by
Skate Park Construction on a Thames-side Tooley Street site, Skate City
opened in August 1977 and closed just 14 months later—this open-air
skatepark famously provided the country’s first truly vertical bowls. Hot
Wheels duly shows the likes of Simon Napper, John Sablosky, Jeremy
Henderson, Alex Turnbull, John Turnbull, Paul Sully and Hugo Carey
careering around steeply transitioned walls, performing kickturns and
tailblock moves, and even shooting aerial manoeuvres out of Skate City’s
notorious Black Bowl (‘The Sun Rises on Skate City’; Rollin’ through the
Decades) (see Fig. 1).
Fig. 1 John Sablosky performing a frontside aerial at Skate City’s ‘Black Bowl’.
Slow-motion sequence from Hot Wheels (1978)
On one level, Hot Wheels is important for providing extensive foot-

age of London’s original skatepark. Some amateur and news snippets of
Skate City also survive, as do clips of other London skateparks, such as
the Mad Dog Bowl in a disused cinema on Old Kent Road and Rolling
Thunder within the abandoned Brentford Market (‘United States
Skateboarding Aces’; ‘Skate Boarding: Skate City’; ‘Skate City’; ‘Team of
Youngsters’; ‘Vintage Footage of Rolling Thunder’). A short news item
about Hillingdon’s tent-covered Spandrel Skate Dome includes Logos
team riders Shane Cutts, Alex Turnbull and Ben Liddell, along with vis-
iting American professional Bobby Piercy (‘Young Skateboard Fans’).
Even better are sequences shot at Harrow’s Solid Surf, notably a pro-
motional short for UK skateboard manufacturer Benjyboards (owned by
actor Ben Howard and Pretty Things keyboardist John Povey), in which
Jeremy Henderson, John Sablosky, Marc Sinclair and Jules Gayton ride
the skatepark’s half-pipe, pool and intimidatingly large ‘Performance
Bowl’ (‘Benjyboard promo video’; ‘John Sablosky.avi’; ‘Jeremy
Henderson 02.avi’;’‘Marc Sinclair.avi’; ‘Jules Gayton.avi’; ‘Baker Skates’;
‘Rollin’ through the Decades’). Nonetheless, Hot Wheels remains the best
recording of London skatepark-riding, providing invaluable documenta-
tion of a unique episode in the capital’s architectural and social history.‬‬
Besides providing historical evidence, how Hot Wheels records skate-
boarding is just as significant, presenting London as a montage of places,
bodies and moves; the Skate City sequences, for example, are intercut
with footage from Meanwhile Gardens and the Michael Sobell Centre
demo, while sophisticated filming and editing techniques—including
slow-motion, blurs, fast-pans, skateboard-mounted cameras viewing via
angled mirrors, and closely miked roaring wheels—further destabilise the
skatepark as a rational entity. Rather than being presented as an identifi-
able site with named individuals, in Hot Wheels Skate City becomes a glo-
rious mélange of place, people and action, and of different views, sounds
and speeds. This effect is further heightened by the inclusion of many
black, female and older skaters alongside more stereotypical white male
teenagers. In this seductively sweet yet subtly sophisticated portrayal of
skateboarding’s halcyon days—as yet seemingly untroubled by commer-
cial pressures, cultural constraints or legal restrictions—London is rep-
resented as a joyous world, where all kinds of people create their own
city from vital energy, simple technology and inventive architecture. And
Hot Wheels suggests that film is the best way to represent this activity,
182 I. Borden
capturing skateboarding’s vivacity in a manner far more dynamic than

could any text or photograph.
Renaissance
Yet, however vibrant Hot Wheels and other 1970s depictions of skate-
boarding might be, they are clearly created not by integral protagonists
but by filmers and journalists who, although sympathetic to skateboard-
ing’s youthful energy and spatial innovation, remained as somewhat dis-
tanced observers. This all soon changed. During a dramatic downturn
in popularity during the early 1980s, a few skaters struggled on at the
Undercroft, as well as at a few other London locations like the Crystal
Palace, Crouch End and Westway half-pipes (standalone U-shaped con-
structions measuring 3–4 m tall), these isolated scenes being captured
by the skaters themselves in rare documentaries like Graham Fletcher-
Cook’s Ollie the Gap (1988) and Winstan Whitter’s retrospective Rollin’
through the Decades (2005).
Yet not all was lost. Fuelled by skateboarding’s rebirth as a predomi-
nantly street-based activity—in contrast to the mainly skatepark and half-
pipe settings of the 1970s and mid-1980s—UK skateboarding enjoyed
a massive renaissance from the late 1980s onwards, with the capital at
its very heart. London-centric videos like Deathbox’s Spirit of the Blitz
(1991), Panic and Blueprint’s Anthems (1997) and the independently
released Playing Fields (1997) are a form of cinema verité, where skat-
ers traverse actual streets, confront security guards, get ejected from
skatespots and slam hard, the overall sense of uproarious behaviour being
enhanced by the videos’ authentically blurry, shaky and grainy quality.
Gone now were the semi-official 1970s recordings of skateboarding as
a predominantly American import and innocent activity, as promulgated
by broadcasters like the BBC and expert filmmakers like Gayer, these
being now replaced by self-made productions emanating from skate-
boarders themselves, and exemplified by camcorder usage, minuscule
budgets, low production quality and rough editing, and yet somehow
instilled with a raucous mood and indefatigable energy (Griffin). As artist
Nam June Paik described the liberatory potential of the new camcorder
technology, ‘Television has been attacking us all our lives. Now we can
attack it back’ (Elwes).
These skater-directed camcorder productions, alongside other new
technologies, also led to skateboarding being relayed much more rapidly,
so generating innovative tricks. ‘News of modern moves, the tricky tricks

and the flippity kicks,’ reported Thrasher in 1991, ‘spread like wildfire via
phone, fax, Xerox and mini-cams’ (‘Major Moves’). Indeed, print-based
skateboard magazines like the American Thrasher and the London-based
R.A.D. and Sidewalk Surfer resorted to repurposing VHS and Hi-8 foot-
age into grainy multi-frame sequences which captured complex street
tricks. Furthermore, in the videos themselves, the use of close-up views,
ultra-fish-eye lenses and hand-held cameras, along with the common
inclusion in shot of skater-filmers alongside skater-riders (either directly
or indirectly through obvious shadows and filming equipment), all rein-
force the sense that filmers, performers and viewers alike are part of the
same community, equally integral to skateboarding’s fast-paced invasion
of the city core. As pro rider Matt Hensley noted of these skater-made
videos, ‘kids everywhere saw that and said, yes, we can do this’ (‘Matt
Hensley on Skateboarding’).
On one level, these videos, as with Hot Wheels, provide a useful guide
to significant London skatespots and skaters. For example, in Anthems,
Matt Pritchard flies down 13 steps at Bishopsgate and jumps a 3.5 m
gap across ‘Bird Shit Banks’ at the Southbank, Colin Kennedy grinds
an Undercroft wall ledge and slides along City handrails, John Rattray
negotiates flat ground and walls besides St Paul’s, and Paul Shier per-
forms ollies and flips at the Shell Centre, while in Playing Fields Alex
Moul, Colin Kennedy, Mat Fowler and Frank Stephens undertake simi-
lar actions at the Barbican, Broadgate and Royal College of Physicians,
while also flying down staircases, thumping off walls and dicing with traf-
fic. And in the youth-oriented television programme ‘RAD’, broadcast
between 1998 and 2003, skater Marc Churchill provides an alternative
tourist guide, featuring famous skateboarding places like Euston Station
banks, Victoria Street benches, Bishopsgate ledges, Stockwell skatepark,
Kennington Park bowl, and Meanwhile II skatepark’s ‘Gonz gap’ (‘RAD
– London’s Skate Spots’; ‘RAD – a Look at London’s Skateparks’.
More than just recordings of London skateboarding sites, however,
these 1990s videos helped mount significant critiques of urban space and
architecture. The tendency discernible in Hot Wheels to prioritise personal
experience over rational visualisations of London now became a domi-
nant trope, with the mobile skater-held cameras and fish-eye lenses (often
held at ankle-level) emphasising the rushing skater and their immediate
terrain over any sense of recognisable monuments or other conventional
representations. The normative architecture of London, conventionally
184 I. Borden
thought of as whole buildings, named designers and clearly mapped list-

ings, is consequently fractured by these skate videos into a series of dis-
continuous ledges, steps, walls and banks, before being recomposed into
a new unity through the editing together of skateboarders’ multiple runs
through the city, and further consolidated by accompanying rock, reg-
gae or dance tracks. At its most extreme, in a video like Death Squad, the
Movie (1998) by the UK’s Death outfit, London skateboarding architec-
ture is almost entirely splintered within an anarchic assemblage of British
skateparks, street spots, skaters and everyday scenes.
Alternatively, as later recalled in Rollin’ through the Decades, a noto-
rious skatepark like The Arches, a short-lived 1991 insertion in Ewer
Street near London Bridge, emerges as a half-hidden event-space in
which hurriedly constructed ramps, left-over theatrical props, dodgy
financing, sketchy admissions and a carnivalesque atmosphere combined
into an intense skateboarding crucible. As Curtis McCann declared,
The Arches was ‘buzzing, like a video-shoot every day,’ the archetypal
London skate venue ‘where people should be pushing stuff, and people
should be going off.’ Here London is revealed as being constructed not
just from official sites or landmarks, but also from semi-secret hideaways,
accessible only to those in the know and with the requisite determination
to seek them out.
With such videos, therefore, comes a significant critique of London
urbanism, suggesting that the city exists not just for work and leisure,
business people and shoppers, prescribed and reliable functions, but also
for acts of pure pleasure, people of all ages and appearance, and for risky
and transgressive behaviours. London architecture, it is so declared, is
not only designed by architects, laid out by planners, controlled by urban
managers and described by official guides, but becomes a true social
space when ordinary Londoners re-use it as part of their everyday lives,
and often in unusual, unpredictable and uncontrolled manners.
Within and Beyond London

The dual process of documenting and critiquing unsurprisingly con-
tinues into the 2000s and 2010s, with notable videos and documen-
taries like In Motion (2003), OG Distribution’s Never Been Loved
(2005), Rollin’ through the Decades (2005), Blueprint’s Lost and
Found (2005) and Make Friends with the Colour Blue (2010), Death
Skateboards’ Better Than Life (2008), Heel Toe Magic (2009), Square
One (2009), The Lovenskate Video (2012), Eleventh Hour (2013),

Skate World: England (2013), Heroin Skateboards’ Video Nasty
(2013), Albion (2014), Rugged Raw (2014) and Isle’s Vase (2015).
And in overall approach, these productions are not remarkably dif-
ferent to their 1990s precursors, although they do update the ever-
changing rota of riders and skatespots; as Skate London (2014) shows,
these might include the likes of Tom Knox and Nick Jensen skating a
ledge besides Blackfriars Bridge or an open yard in Borough. ‘There
are so many different quirks and avenues and alleyways you can take
off and make your own path,’ comments Jensen. ‘That’s the beauty of
London, it’s spontaneous and always new things are coming up.’
Besides the continual documentation of street spots, riders and skate-
boarding’s performative critique of public space, several films have ampli-
fied London skateboarding in other significant ways, on the one hand
exploring the richness of the immediate scene, and on the other hand
charting its impact upon a wider geography. In this way they extend our
understanding of skateboarding both deeper within and extending far
beyond the capital.
Notable here is the increasing politicisation of skateboarding as
resistant to neo-liberalism, now moving from skateboarding’s inher-
ent 1990s performative critique of consumerism and business cul-
ture into more outright confrontations. In London this most clearly
occurred in the concerted skateboarder-led campaign under the Long
Live Southbank (LLSB) banner to prevent skateboarding and associ-
ated BMX and graffiti activities from being moved from the Undercroft
to another nearby location—a long-threatened development which was
finally proposed officially by the Southbank Centre in 2013 (Borden
2014, 2015). This is not the place to explicate these events, but suffice
to note that film was crucial in generating support for the ultimately
successful campaign. For example, documentaries like Save South Bank
(2008), LLSB’s The Bigger Picture (2013), You Can’t Move History
(2015) and The Undercroft (2015) variously mounted critiques of alter-
native proposals, strengthened historical understanding, and celebrated
the diversity of Undercroft users. In particular, LLSB cleverly amalga-
mated its films with physical (on-site presence, marches etc.) and digital
(online petitions, website, social media etc.) activities—a strategy which
later won ‘engagement campaign of the year’ from the Change Opinion
Awards.
186 I. Borden
The Undercroft campaign’s success also benefitted greatly from a gen-

eral and growing realisation that skateboarding is closely coupled with
other artistic activities, from painting, filmmaking, photography and
street art to dance, music and poetry. This is clearly evident in numerous
video shorts making direct connections between London skateboard-
ing and creative industries, such as Philip Evans’ YouTube interview
with skater-artist Nick Jensen (Evans 2010). It is even more dramati-
cally demonstrated in the work of someone like Angus Leadley Brown,
who in the early 2000s produced a series of time-lapse ‘synchroballistic’
photographs (where the film stock is motorised across an open lens) dis-
closing skaters’ moves as distorted continuums of body and skateboard.
Extending this technique into moving images, Leadley Brown’s video
Passenger (2004) tracks Greg Finch skateboarding across High Holborn
and Queen Victoria Street towards London Bridge, intercut with
extraordinary sequences in which skater and board writhe and distend,
as other-worldly contortions of body, space and time. More subtly, Philip
Evans’ London with Nick Jensen (2013) instalment of The Panoramic
Series of videos deploys an ultra-wide aspect ratio to artfully shift atten-
tion away from the skateboarder, instead heightening the viewer’s aware-
ness of adjacent spaces, figures and rhythms in the broader cityscape.
Similarly Tim Kellner’s short London Night Skate (2014) extends tem-
poral and perceptual boundaries, exploring skateboarding in the capi-
tal’s darkened streets, now rendered dreamlike by artificial light, slower
speeds and inky shadows.
As these videos suggest, filmic representations of urban skateboard-
ing are often different to conventional A–B journeys made using A–Z
guides, being closer to Situationist tactics of the dérive, détournement
and psychogeography, and undertaken through drifting journeys and
emotionally informed cognitive maps. Quentin Stevens, Kim Dovey
and Hunter Fine have even related such skateboarding trajectories to
Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘rhizome’ concept, by which non-organisational
connections are made between multiple and non-hierarchical points. ‘We
observe the cracks and the curbs, the absurdity that our city has an unad-
mired beauty,’ states skateboarding video poem A Guide to Cracks &
Curbs: London (Shade Media and Lloyd 2015). ‘Our commute is from A
to everywhere, it is your nothing and our everything.’
In a slightly different manner, documentaries like Format Perspective
(Philip Evans 2012) track the creative aspects of skateboard photogra-
phy, including the work of London-based lensman Alex Irvine, who
records skateparks like Stockwell and Tottenham Hale alongside other

locations worldwide. TransWorld Skateboarding’s documentary The
Cinematographer Project (2012) similarly incorporates filmmaker Torsten
Frank, who charts skaters like Chewy Cannon in a high-speed traverse of
London pavements, steps, underpasses, roads and car parks.
Alongside skater-artists, skater-filmers and skater-poets, skateboard-
ing in London, as elsewhere, is increasingly being practised by a richer
demographic. Hence Lucia Helenka’s The Fat: Facts About Skateboarding
(2001) inspects the mind-set and social diversity of London skaters,
while in 2014 BBC London News reported amazedly on the increas-
ing appearance of skaters in their thirties and older, including a school
chaplain (‘BBC London News Features Skateboarding’). Two docu-
mentaries by Jenna Selby, As If and What? (2009) and Days Like These
(2015), similarly celebrate the rising numbers of female skaters, showing
the likes of Lucy Adams, Lacey Baker, Charlotte Brennan, Sam Bruce,
Laura Goh, Savannah Keenan, Helena Long, Camilla Mullins, Lois
Pendlebury, Emma Richardson and Zoe Kings riding at innumerable
London skateparks and street spots.
The growing interest in skateboarding is also resulting in explorations
of particular skateparks and wider histories. When in October 2014 Rom
in Hornchurch, at the eastern end of London’s District Line, became
only the second skatepark worldwide to achieve historic preservation sta-
tus, the international media coverage included extensive BBC and ITN
news reporting. Subsequently, a major documentary is being prepared;
directed by Matt Harris, Rom Boys: 40 Years of Rad, is being planned
for release in 2018 to coincide with Rom skatepark’s fortieth anniversary.
Another documentary, A Concrete California (Jim Ford), on UK skate-
boarding is also in the early stages of preparation, in which London will
inevitably feature strongly.
Yet if all these political, artistic, inclusionary and historically minded
films present London skateboarding as a vital cultural phenomenon, then
it must also be noted how skateboarding’s espousal of independence,
robustness and self-reliance chimes readily with neoliberalism’s expec-
tation that citizens should be autonomous, adaptable and self-reflexive.
As historians Kara-Jane Lombard and Sean Dinces note, skateboarders,
as entrepreneurs of their own skills and talents, are part of the general
emergence of exactly this kind of neoliberal individual, integral to late
capitalism’s strategy of flexible accumulation.
188 I. Borden
In film, we see this in the trajectory of current London street skat-

ers like Chewy Cannon, Benny Fairfax, Blondey McCoy and Caspar
Brooker. These skaters were once marked as being ‘up from South
London’ and ‘up from the Undercroft’ in various Henry Edwards-Wood
videos, including City of Rats (2012) for London’s renowned shop Slam
City Skates and the ‘Hold Tight London’ series ‘documenting and pro-
moting the underground London skateboard scene.’ Edwards-Wood’s
2011 promo for Stella Supply in particular depicts such South-London
skaters as a roving band of beer drinkers and fighting dog-owners, who,
to the tune of Buccaneer’s ragga track ‘Fade Away,’ aggressively defy
security guards and laugh-off unhappy local residents, in a manner no
doubt intended as authentically gritty. However, after featuring heavily
in the rise of skateboarding-themed clothing/fashion Palace—a brand
set up by Slam City’s owners as the capital’s rival to New York’s uber-
trendy Supreme—many of these skaters star in high-budget marketing-
centric skate videos like Adidas’ Away Days (2016), hence helping this
global sports brand (and occasional partner Palace) to promote shoes,
clothing, footballs and other merchandise (see Fig. 2). Through such
filmic journeys, street-level London kudos has been expertly leveraged
into globalised marketing and fashion, while simultaneously shifting away
Fig. 2 Benny Fairfax (left) and Chewy Cannon (right) in front of the
Undercroft, in Adidas’ Away Days (2016)
skaters like Cannon, Fairfax and McCoy—who star in Away Days—from

the anti-mainstream ethos of their earlier videos. ‘As representatives of
Adidas Skateboarding and Palace,’ announces the blurb accompanying
another promo video, ‘Chewy Cannon and Benny Fairfax exemplify the
essence of London street skating and can be seen in this exclusive edit
extending the classic London style to spots all over the globe’ (‘Adidas
Skateboarding Benny & Chewy Palace’). Or, as another Adidas/Palace
video, this time centred on the Undercroft skatespot, concludes: ‘Run,
skate, chill, go to the shop’ (‘Adidas Originals | Palace Skateboards’).
As this all shows, some London skateboarding videos now openly
operate within a brand-infused global market. Similarly, in 2014
American skate/leisure shoe brand Vans opened House of Vans, a
skatepark plus cinema, gallery and gig venue beneath the Waterloo rail-
tracks and close to the Undercroft. As a free-access venture, the House
of Vans predominantly pays its way by generating video and social media
content for its multi-billion dollar owner. For example, the ‘Crossfire
Halloween Massacre’ event—a ‘raucous night’ of skate sessions, death-
punks Turbonegro, ‘Massacre’ art and horror films—was aired via a live
web feed and innumerable online videos and blogs (Leeks). Alternatively,
major budget American skateboard videos—such as Krooked’s Gnar
Gnar (2007), Lakai and Girl’s Fully Flared (2007), Plan B’s True (2014)
and Vans’ Propeller (2015)—along with independent productions like
This Time Tomorrow (2013) frequently incorporate London within their
globe-trotting geography. For example, in Girl and Chocolate’s Pretty
Sweet (2012), American professional Sean Malto rides down handrails
at Euston Station and London Wall as part of a massive litany of other
skatespots, riders and cities worldwide. Similarly in Thrasher Vacation
(2014), riders Grant Taylor, Raven Tershy, Ronnie Sandoval and Jack
Curtin negotiate skate venues like House of Vans, Stockwell, Rom,
Tottenham Hale, Victoria Park, Harrow and the Undercroft, drawing
over 275,000 YouTube viewers. London is here being integrated within
a well-established form of global skateboard tourism, both real and vir-
tual, part of a worldwide range of similar destinations—such as Shanghai
and Tokyo, Berlin and Malmo, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, Caracas
and Rio—all being used to promote skateboarding culture and markets.
***
Not all globalised disseminations of London skateboard videos and
related social media are, however, so commercially oriented. Ever since
190 I. Borden
skateboarders first devoured 1970s magazines like SkateBoarder and

Skateboard! and later became early adopters of camcorder technology,
photographic and filmic representations have been an integral part of
skateboarding. Today, in any given skateboard session at least one group
member will typically film proceedings, and then quickly relay recordings
via Instagram, Tumblr, WhatsApp, Facebook and/or specialist online
forums. Alternatively, local groups like South London’s With Section will
edit together videos like Twenty-Fourteen (2014) and So What? (2016) as
rambunctious records of recent adventures, from creating a skatespot in
Sydenham in South London to travelling between other DIY skateparks
across Europe (see Fig. 3). Uploaded onto With Section’s website,
Tumblr and Instagram accounts, these videos are at once self-documen-
tation, local information and global communications, fed via social media
into a network of similar productions created by thousands of equivalent
skate groups around the world (www.withsection.com).
In such manner, films of London skateboarding are constantly being
produced and transmitted across global audiences, while side-stepping
the various exigencies and constraints of commerce, brands, experts
and authorities. This is film as grassroots democratic activity, at once
Fig. 3 DIY constructed skatespot in Sydenham, South London, by With

Section. So What? (2016)
immediate, energetic and connected. Above all, filmic depictions of

London skateboarding are now simultaneously recordings of agents
within and communications beyond the immediate confines of the capi-
tal. Film is an essential part of how London skateboarders act, enriching
both their local lives and wider worlds.
Acknowledgements Thanks to Rob Ashby, Andy Beevers, Graham Fletcher-

Cook, Rodga Harvey, Peter Jones, Paul Price, Guy Roberts, Michael Stride,
Winstan Whitter and the collective knowledge of the Facebook group ‘Lost &
Found—1970s Concrete Skateparks in the UK.’
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Shaun of the Dead and the Construction
of Cult Space in Millennial London
Paul Newland
Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of

ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thou-
sands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day
broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust
of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumu-
lating at compound interest.
Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Shaun of the Dead (2004) forms part of the ongoing collaboration

between director Edgar Wright and actor Simon Pegg, from the cult
British television series Spaced (Channel 4, 1999–2001), through this
film, to Hot Fuzz (2007), and The World’s End (2013), which completed
the so-called ‘Three Flavours Cornetto’ trilogy. Shaun of the Dead tells
the story of a zombie outbreak in millennial London. The 29-year-old,
lower-middle-class Shaun (Simon Pegg) and his lackadaisical best mate,
Ed (Nick Frost), live in a shared house in the northern inner suburbs
of the city, and spend most of their free time drinking beer in
P. Newland (*) 
Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, UK
e-mail: pnn@aber.ac.uk

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64979-5_14
194 P. Newland
The Winchester, a large Victorian pub. As the zombie outbreak hits,

Shaun and Ed set out to rescue Shaun’s girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield)
and mum, Barbara (Penelope Wilton), and decide to take refuge in The
Winchester until the threat subsides.
Just as Ben Highmore, writing about urban life, argues that ‘entropy
is the condition of the city’ (2005, 152), Shaun of the Dead repre-
sents the inner periphery of millennial London as essentially in decline.
Indeed, in response to the escalating zombie event, Shaun’s stepfather
Philip (Bill Nighy) tellingly remarks that it is probably nothing more
than ‘a load of drunk nuts running wild’, as if to recognise that the
undead have been occupying this part of London for some time. We also
witness Shaun gradually noticing that bus passengers, shop workers and
people in the street are also effectively undead, even before the zombie
event occurs. Here, then, Shaun of the Dead draws on key tropes of the
US zombie horror genre tradition, and the films of George Romero in
particular. Gordon Coonfield usefully remarks that ‘the zombie imagi-
nary interrogates the nature of the social bond in the face of civil soci-
ety’s collapse’ (2013, 3). Shaun of the Dead certainly does this, drawing
as it does on the cultural phenomenon of the zombie to comment, in
a playful way, on degenerative aspects of socio-cultural life in the con-
temporary city. The film thus marks life in this specific part of millennial
London as repetitive and tedious, characterised by alienation, listlessness
and ennui, and potentially on the verge of a catastrophic breakdown.
At the same time, Shaun of the Dead documents the tensions that
develop between the socio-cultural requirement to ‘achieve something’
in New Labour’s London, and the inability or lack of interest of some
individuals (such as Shaun and Ed) to engage with this ideology. Indeed,
it is through the troubled relationship between Shaun and Liz in par-
ticular that the film makes this primary socio-cultural comment. After all,
when Liz says to Shaun, ‘If I don’t do something I’m going to end up
in this pub every night for the rest of my life like these sad old fuck-
ers, drinking myself to death, wondering what the hell happened,’ Shaun
replies, ‘What do you mean “do something”?’ It is the tension between
the promise of the type of bourgeois London lifestyles that might be
achieved by ‘doing something’, and the quotidian realities of the lives
of many others living on the periphery of the city who cannot or will
not ‘do something’ in such terms, that effectively triggers the break-
down of the relationship between fantasy and reality that underscores the
film. This is, after all, a London in which ‘doing something’ might in all
SHAUN OF THE DEAD AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF CULT SPACE … 195
probability get you nowhere, because property prices—and the concom-

itant commodification of the home—have so noticeably affected social
life. The dream of property ownership and relative financial security
seems to be out of reach to most of the young people in the film. This
becomes evident when we witness Shaun’s incredulity as he learns that
his old friend Yvonne (Jessica Hynes, credited as Jessica Stevenson) has
recently managed to buy a property. Meanwhile, Ed’s decision to choose
the life of a loafer—playing computer games, snacking on junk food,
drinking heavily, and engaging in minor drug deals—perhaps exemplifies
a mode of resistance to this pervasive millennial ‘do something’ ideology.
Shaun of the Dead is a London film. But it is significant that the
London of Shaun of the Dead is not the recognisable, re-branded
global London characterised by major architectural projects such the
Millennium Dome, the Swiss Re building on St Mary Axe (the so-called
‘Gherkin’), the Tate Modern art gallery, and the London Eye; buildings
that came to represent the spectacle of Millennial London (see Levenson
2002). Nor is it the older, more familiar tourist London exemplified by
Tower Bridge, Buckingham Palace, and St Paul’s Cathedral. However,
Shaun of the Dead sometimes echoes earlier London horror films. After
all, Peter Hutchings argues that ‘Horror London’ is ‘wedded to a sense
of the Victorian’ (2009, 190), and much of the horror of Shaun of the
Dead takes place in Victorian-built streets. However, the film does little
more than gesture towards such a vision of London, and, even then, only
momentarily, through the pseudo-gothic nature of its night sequences.
According to Charlotte Brunsdon, the London seen in Shaun of the
Dead is ‘undistinctive London’ or ‘London as it is lived’ (2007, 57).
This is certainly an accurate description, and one I would like to build on
here. But I would also like to suggest that through its very undistinctive-
ness Shaun of the Dead also depicts—and indeed serves to inaugurate—
aspects of a complex ‘cult London’.
Cult London thrives in usually unseen or unnoticed places; places
effectively ignored by most other mainstream representations of the city.
In order to locate cult London, one might look to the writing of Iain
Sinclair and J.G. Ballard, among others, but also to cult films includ-
ing Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), Jerzy Skolimowski’s
Deep End (1970), Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s Performance
(1970), Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), Stephen Frears’s
My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Bruce Robinson’s Withnail and
I (1987). All of these films depict often-unusual visions of peripheral
196 P. Newland
London locations. But the cult London inaugurated by Shaun of the

Dead has its own specificities.
Shaun of the Dead was primarily shot in Crouch End and its environs
in north London (interiors were shot at Ealing Studios). This specific
area of the city, lying to the north of Finsbury Park, has generally been
ignored in British cinema. Having said that, inner suburban districts not
far from Crouch End feature in Mike Leigh’s 1990s films, such as the
Dalston of Naked (1993), the Southgate and Winchmore Hill of Secrets
and Lies (1996), the Enfield of Life Is Sweet (1990), and the Camden
of Career Girls (1997). Leigh’s films explore the dark heart of 1990s
London in its primarily Victorian-built northern inner suburbs, and, as
such, there might be some fruitful links to be made between these films
and Shaun of the Dead. But Shaun of the Dead’s inner suburban London
perhaps more obviously harks back to 1940s British films such as This
Happy Breed (David Lean, 1944), Waterloo Road (Sidney Gilliat, 1945)
and the Ealing film Passport to Pimlico (Henry Cornelius, 1949). While
not shot in Crouch End or its immediately surrounding districts, these
1940s films captured lives lived in modest, late-Victorian-built London
terraces. Just over half a century later, though, in Shaun of the Dead (a
film that very much echoes other key tropes of the classic Ealing come-
dies of the 1940s and 1950s), such Victorian London terraces no longer
accommodate well-meaning, hard-working families, but instead house
half-alive young adults, unemployed, or at best working in dead-end
jobs.
Shaun of the Dead is also a cult film. It is important to note that
Shaun of the Dead formally draws on—and very much knowingly situates
itself within the contexts of—cult cinema. It does this by recalling US
zombie films of the 1970s, of course, but also through its many inter-
textual, pop-culture references (Lukas 2009, 233) and its employment
of a quirky and eclectic soundtrack. So, Shaun of the Dead is a film that
effectively hails a cult audience. Matt Hills writes of the development of
such ‘production/textual strategies’ on the part of contemporary film-
makers (2002, 449; see also Mathijs and Sexton 2011, 236). I want to
argue here that the decision to shoot the film in often unseen places in
the city—places thus not overburdened with prior signification—has
aided the film in its successful search for its cult audience. In order to
make my argument about the cult nature of the London space depicted
in (and inaugurated by) Shaun of the Dead, I will offer an analysis of
two short but related sequences in which the titular Shaun (Pegg) walks
approximately fifty metres from the front door of his house in Crouch
End to the local convenience store. Both sequences allow us, through
the formal device of a moving handheld camera and a carefully designed
soundscape, to experience the rhythms of an otherwise unremarkable
part of the city; a part of the city that has now become a cult territory.
Shaun’s Walks to the Convenience Store

Henri Lefebvre argues ‘everywhere where there is interaction between a
place, a time and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm’ (2004, 15).
For Ben Highmore, who has written extensively on Lefebvre’s theories,
rhythmanalysis is ‘a desire to pick out the different beats and pulses of
urban experience and find ways of registering their syncopated arrange-
ments’ (2005, 9). By paying attention to the rhythms of the city pro-
duced and captured by the two sequences in which Shaun walks to the
convenience store we might further understand how the film facilitates
the development of cult London.
The exterior of Shaun’s house was shot at 83 Nelson Road in Crouch
End. This is a nondescript, red-brick Victorian house, situated on a long,
straight residential street bordered by terraced houses running uphill
towards the north-London high point of Alexandra Palace. In these
two linked sequences, Shaun walks from his house, across Nelson Road,
across and along Weston Park, and subsequently enters a small local
convenience store. It is significant that the first of Shaun’s two walks to
the convenience store begins with a close-up shot of a Yellow Pages tel-
ephone directory for north London, but also, more importantly, that the
camera makes the Nelson Road street sign clearly visible as Shaun passes
it. By foregrounding real street signs, Shaun of the Dead actively encour-
ages the development of a web of imaginative cult space that might be
anchored in this real, humdrum north-London location.
The first thing to say about Shaun’s two walks is that they are—for
him, at least—repeated, ordinary, everyday walks through a nondescript
inner-urban residential district. The precise route Shaun takes to the con-
venience store is almost exactly the same in both sequences (but we get
to see Shaun return home during the second walk, when he is clearly
oblivious to the zombies now in the street). In both sequences, Shaun
opens and walks through the small garden gate, and immediately makes
his way across Nelson Road (Figs. 1 and 2).
198 P. Newland
Fig. 1 Walk one. Shaun of the Dead (2004)
Fig. 2 Walk two. Shaun of the Dead (2004)
Then, before mounting the pavement on the other side of this street,
Shaun raises his right hand to scratch the back of his neck. With the
Nelson Road sign clearly visible, we see Shaun walk around the corner
of Nelson Road and into Weston Park, and the camera follows him as he
walks across Weston Park, between two traffic bollards in the middle of
this street, past a parked blue Vauxhall car, and up onto the pavement,
where, both times, he trips on the kerb, and spins around to look for
the cause of this involuntary movement. Adjusting his tie while still walk-
ing, Shaun moves on, past a six-foot-high red brick wall and a green tele-
phone junction situated on the pavement, before arriving at a small local
shopping precinct. Here Shaun turns left into the small convenience
store. As we follow Shaun in through the door of the store we watch him
walk down an aisle between shelving stacked with everyday goods, and
open the door of a refrigerator. Shaun pauses for a second here with the
door of the refrigerator open on both occasions as he chooses a can of
cola (regular Coke on the first occasion; Diet Coke on the second—evi-
dencing his decision to try to improve himself), and he then walks back
towards the till at the front of the shop.
In both sequences, Shaun’s walk has a detectable rhythm: it is slow
and relaxed. His walks are syncopated, though, and their rhythms
are punctuated by similar beats. These syncopated rhythmical actions
strongly evoke the routine nature of Shaun’s life, but also say some
things about the kind of man he is, and, of course, the urban environ-
ment in which he lives. For example, the scratching of the neck and the
trip up the pavement evidence his absent-mindedness, but his engage-
ment with the homeless man and the shopkeeper evidence his potential
for warmth and friendliness.
Shaun’s repeated trips up the kerb can be read in a range of different
ways. Georg Simmel, in his influential ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’
(1903), argued that the psychological identity of the metropolitan indi-
vidual can be found ‘with every crossing of the street, with the tempo
and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life’ (Simmel 2010,
103). Perhaps Shaun feels he knows the walk so well—through endlessly
repeating it—that he can navigate this minor obstacle without look-
ing. But the fact that he trips suggests that his mind is perpetually else-
where (which very much chimes with his girlfriend Liz’s view of him at
the beginning of the film). The key narrative function of these walks is to
demonstrate to the spectator that, while there has evidently been a zom-
bie outbreak by the time Shaun undertakes the second walk, he himself
remains unaware of any significant change to the rhythms of the street.
These sequences operate as a kind of filmic conceit, then, communicat-
ing as they do the extended metaphor at the heart of the film linking live
individuals and zombies in this humdrum area of contemporary London.
Shaun’s repeated trips up the kerb might also be read as an evocation of a
sudden moment in which this young Londoner feels fully alive (as opposed
to undead) in his body in this urban environment. That is, through this
unwilled bodily movement, Shaun has a sudden, fleeting awareness of his
status as an animate, conscious, functioning, alive individual.
While the signature rhythms of Shaun’s walk are effectively repeated
in both sequences, and the mix of diegetic and extradiegetic music
200 P. Newland
is also similar on both occasions, the walks have detectable counter-

rhythms that shift noticeably. It is the other moving bodies in the street
that primarily provide these choreographed counter rhythms. In the first
sequence Shaun briefly engages with a boy playing football outside his
house, gives a homeless man some change, and walks past a man clean-
ing the windscreen of the blue Vauxhall. He is also passed by a jogger,
and stared at by a bin man standing outside the convenience store. In
the second sequence the boy has vanished, the jogger becomes a man
running for his life, and the homeless man with the dog reappears, stag-
gering in the middle of the same street, but without the dog. Despite
the fact that in the second sequence one of the bollards in the middle of
Weston Park has also been knocked off its mooring, the blue Vauxhall
now has a hole in its windscreen, and the street is now littered with
detritus such as pizza delivery bikes and supermarket trolleys, the reap-
pearance of some of these figures in the street suggests that any change
in the rhythms of everyday life after the zombie outbreak hits are not
simple or straightforward. Mike Crang argues that ‘the popular account
of metropolitan life is of one of increasing pace’ (2001, 188). But
Shaun’s two walks help the film to show that there are parts of the con-
temporary metropolis that do not have immense crowds or the speed of
movement that characterise spaces of capitalism and consumerism exem-
plified by London’s City and West End. Instead, this inner urban dis-
trict has a noticeably slower rhythm that allows the film to explore the
lifestyles of Londoners who do not necessarily share the opportunities
promised elsewhere by the discourses of the millennial city. The film thus
comments on the repetitive, ordinary, everyday rhythms of a humdrum
part of the city, evoking its status as a place in which people are not fully
embracing the bourgeois dream of ‘doing something’, but are instead
merely surviving as best they can. Rita Felski points out that ‘everyday
life is above all a temporal term. As such it conveys the fact of repetition;
it refers not to the singular or unique but to that which happens “day
after day”’ (2000, 81). Significantly, Lefebvre also wrote of ‘the daily
grind, the routine’ (2004, 30). Shaun of the Dead works to foreground
contemporary urban rhythms of routine and repetition in order to make
a playful comment on how far this part of the contemporary city might
already be seen to be a space of the undead.
Shaun’s walks to the convenience store—and the gestures this com-
prises—might also be read through Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the
refrain. For Deleuze and Guattari, a refrain is a repetitious and rhythmic
pattern that can create a territory. Refrains can be fragments of songs,

words, or other expressive, repeated elements. So, refrains are temporal,
and evoke duration. Deleuze and Guattari focus most of their attention
on sonic refrains (such as hummed tunes), but also show that refrains
can be characterised by movement. They argue that refrains can become
means of territorialisation, and that such articulations can create domains
(1987, 312). Furthermore, territories produced by refrains are marked
by the presence of a ‘temporal constancy and a spatial range’ (1987,
315). Refrains consist of rhythms but also milieus. Describing milieus,
Deleuze wrote elsewhere: ‘A milieu is made up of qualities, substances,
powers, and events: the street, for example, with its materials (paving
stones), its noises (the cries of merchants), its animals (harnessed horses),
or its dramas (a horse slips, a horse falls down, a horse is beaten)’ (1998,
61). Shaun’s rhythmic, and indeed choreographed, musical walks effec-
tively set up a refrain in these everyday Crouch End streets, allowing
spectators—but especially fans, as I will now show—to comprehend but
also subsequently share in, develop and inhabit the cult territory (or
block of space-time) inscribed by this refrain.
Shaun’s Fans’ Walks to the Convenience Store

Search for Shaun of the Dead on YouTube and, among numerous
uploaded clips of the film and DVD extras, you can find short films
made by individuals who have visited Weston Park and Nelson Road and
filmed themselves approximating and indeed performing Shaun’s walks
between his house and the convenience store. This fan activity—or per-
formance of the refrain—has become central to the creation of cult space
in this peripheral part of millennial London.
Douglas Cunningham argues that through making pilgrimages to film
locations, ‘cinephiles attempt to reify (that is, to ground within the real)
an inherently ephemeral experience of the past while simultaneously utiliz-
ing real spaces as “portals” through which to once again access, person-
ally experience, and even occupy, the past’ (2008, 126). This notion of an
occupation of the past certainly pertains to what occurs during fan pilgrim-
ages to the Crouch End of Shaun of the Dead. But more than just occupy-
ing the past, by visiting Weston Park and Nelson Road, fans are engaged in
what Matt Hills has termed ‘an affective-interpretive process which spills
into and redefines material space’ (2002, 144). What Hills appears to be
getting at here is the fact that fan pilgrimages have a demonstrable effect
202 P. Newland
on space making. So the affective cult fan practices driven by Shaun of the
Dead are developing new rhythms in the streets of Crouch End.
Hills also points out that ‘the audience-text relationship is shifted
towards the monumentality and groundedness of physical locations’,
and that ‘these locations may be themselves banal’ (2002, 149). Weston
Park and Nelson Road have clearly become such ‘banal’ sites of fan pil-
grimage; their cultification through Shaun of the Dead fandom effectively
exploding their banality through a redefinition of material space, to bor-
row Hills’s terminology. For Cornel Sandvoss, fandom ‘best compares to
the emotional significance of the places we have grown to call “home”,
to the form of physical, emotional and ideological space that is best
described as Heimat’ (2005, 64). Thus, it becomes clear that the cult
London territory developed through Shaun of the Dead as a text, and its
fandom, also operates as a space that locates and breeds cult identity as a
kind of imaginative ‘home’ which, again, might exist away or apart from
mainstream spaces of millennial London.
It is important to point out again here that the cult space that has
grown up in the streets of Shaun of the Dead’s Crouch End has been
(and is being) developed through repetition, and this repetition is help-
ing to produce new rhythms. As Barbara Klinger usefully points out,
‘re-enactment, of course, means to perform again, to repeat actions and
events that have already occurred’ (2011, 197). In some ways this also
echoes Deleuze and Guattari’s aforementioned notion of the refrain;
that is, repeated movements in these Crouch End streets, first by Simon
Pegg as Shaun, and subsequently by cult fans’ performative engagements
with ghostly, mnemic traces of these walks, have set up a refrain in this
particular urban milieu. In Delueze and Guattari’s terms, this refrain is
facilitating territorialisation, and thus creating a cult domain (see 1987,
312). Shaun of the Dead, as a representational device, has constructed
(and is constructing), through repetition—and the encouragement of
further fan repetition—cult space in millennial London.
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In Timespace: Geographies of Temporality, ed. Jon May, and Nigel Thrift,
187–207. London: Routledge.
Cunningham, Douglas. 2008. ‘It’s All There, It’s No Dream’: Vertigo and the
Redemptive Powers of the Cinephilic Pilgrimage. Screen 49: 123–141.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1998. Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. D. Smith and
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Reader, 2nd ed, ed. Gary Bridge, and Sophie Watson, 103–110. Chichester:
Wiley.
The Cinematic Revival of ‘Low London’
in the Age of Speculative Urbanism
Malini Guha
Since 2013, a plethora of articles have appeared in the British popular

press that display a preoccupation with the expanding London skyline.
For example, an article published in The Guardian, evocatively titled ‘A
Tortured Heap of Towers: The London Skyline of Tomorrow’, offers
3D images of the London skyline of the future, concentrating on a series
of new skyscrapers deemed ‘the cluster’. Built next to the Gherkin and
Cheesegrater buildings, these new edifices, with equally evocative nick-
names such as ‘Gotham City’ and ‘Can of Ham’, are heralded by some as
a revival project that will complete the vertical vision of the city deferred
during the 2008 recession (Wainwright and Ulmanu 2015). For Gwyn
Richards, head of design of the City of London’s planning team, the
completion of the cluster will render the skyline legible in contrast to its
current status as ‘an incoherent riot’ (Wainwright and Ulmanu 2015).
Richards inadvertently raises the question of control in his comments,
where the desire for ‘clarity on the skyline’ is suggestive of broader anxi-
eties concerning the future of cities the world over, as enhanced methods
of technologically based surveillance and security are met with ever more
M. Guha (*) 
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
e-mail: maliniguha@cunet.carleton.ca

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64979-5_15
206 M. Guha
brazen acts of mass terrorism that often evade all measure of control
(Wainwright and Ulmanu 2015).
And yet, in a series of contemporary, London-set spy/action films,
including Skyfall (2012) and Spectre (2015), it is not the vertical vision
of the city’s surface that overwhelmingly presides; instead, the city’s
underground tunnels, Victorian archways and subterranean systems
assume prominence, which signify an altogether different ‘revival project’
in the face of global terrorism. This chapter will explore these two narra-
tives of London’s regeneration, both of which revive and reconfigure a
deeply rooted historical imaginary that pits ‘high’ against ‘low’ London
in ways that speak to speculative visions of the city’s future.
High and Low London

As many scholars have noted, including Saskia Sassen in her pioneer-
ing work on the subject, building skywards is a classic sign of a city’s
desire to gain entry to the coveted circle of the global city (1991, 255).
The building of Canary Wharf and the redevelopment of the Docklands
served as the architectural counterpart to the deregulation of London’s
financial markets in the late 1980s, signalling the onset of London’s
global identity (Wollen 1993, 31). But, as Maria Kaika argues, new
developments such as the cluster bear the hallmarks of the increasingly
speculative phase of neoliberal capitalism, intent on luring transnational
corporations to the city (2011, 975). Such corporate entities, in their
goals to accumulate capital through the fastest and most flexible means
possible, display what Kaika describes as ‘a noncommittal’ relationship
between the accumulation of capital and place (2011, 975). The inac-
cessibility of these structures, illustrated in their estrangement from the
existing cityscape, alongside of their flexible ownership and derivative
structural design, allow them to ‘operate … as branding objects for mul-
tinational corporations or as speculative objects for real-estate developers’
(Kaika 2010, 467).
To return to Gwyn Richards’ comments concerning the need to cor-
rect the existing version of the London skyline, he gestures towards a
desire for control that signifies in more than one direction. London’s bur-
geoning skyline, which includes the cluster in conjunction with a variety
of high-rise residential projects, signifies as a form of symbolic assurance
for the global financial market that the city remains both competitive and
flexible in a time of economic insecurity (Kaika 2010, 470). This is indeed
THE CINEMATIC REVIVAL OF ‘LOW LONDON’ IN THE AGE … 207
a vision of London careening ever further down a path of gentrification

that excludes a significant section of the city’s population. What this sky-
line disavows are numerous insecurities that function as its structuring
absence, which extend from economic and social factors, to more tangen-
tial anxieties related to global terrorism and environmental degradation.
The drive towards speculative urbanism and the corresponding effect
of gentrification is seemingly at odds with the aims of the Smart London
Plan, which outlines a sprawling mandate for London’s ‘smart’ turn
(Smart London 2016). While there are instances of smart cities built
from the ground up, London is an example of a second version of this
type of city that integrates smart technologies into existing urban land-
scapes. Headed, at the time of writing, by Mayor Sadiq Khan, the Smart
London Plan outlines numerous goals to this effect, which extend from
generating open access data schemes and affordable housing for residen-
tial use to supporting start-up tech companies and improving intelligent
systems related to waste management and transportation. It is a plan
that finds its home along a horizontal, rather than vertical axis and cor-
respondingly seems to cater to the existing rather than speculative needs
of the city’s inhabitants.
On the surface, the expanding London skyline stands in opposition
to plans for affordable, smart housing outlined in the Smart London
Plan, resulting in two different visions of the city of the future. The
first cements a new phase in the city’s global identity and the second
turns inwards in its focus on the problems faced by Londoners them-
selves. However, both redevelopment schemes correspond to a broader
turn towards the speculative. While Kaika outlines exactly how the
burgeoning London skyline doubles as an architectural dedication to
speculative economies, many have argued that the drive towards the
building of smart cities, or making existing cities ‘smart’, similarly falls
under the categorical designation of the speculative. As Orit Halpern
and Gökçe Günel explain, while the discourse of smart cities is framed
by speculative visions of an apocalyptic future stemming from the after-
math of environmental devastation, global financial crises, cyber wars
and terrorist activity, the discourse itself remains resolutely hopeful in
the face of such uncertainty (2015, 15). A similar critique is launched
by architect and scholar Rem Koolhaus in response to the narrative of
a highly controlled form of progress espoused by smart city propo-
nents; as he asks, ‘why do smart cities only offer improvement? Where
is the possibility of transgression?’ (2014). As such, the two competing
208 M. Guha
discourses of the city’s future highlighted in this chapter are imbricated

in similar forms of disavowal; while the new London skyline is meant
to exude clarity that visually staves off economic, social and politi-
cal uncertainty, the current imaginary of smart London offers a series
of vague solutions that do little to address economic inequality and
class-based polarisation that is, in part, perpetuated by these high-rise
developments.
Speculative futures, such as the ones under examination here, lend
themselves to a peculiar form of temporality that ostensibly stems from
the structural absences that haunt them. Halpern and Günel argue that
the apocalyptic future that smart technologies are intended to stave off
or keep at bay is one that never seems to arrive, as it is offset by the
discourse of ‘hope’ that engenders incessant experimentation with the
design and digital infrastructure of cities (2015, 15). The logic of the
‘test-bed’, which they delineate as the epistemological underpinning of
smart urbanism writ large, is one where ‘time is broken’ as it is made
over into ‘uncertainties and trials’ (295). Across this discourse, time
emerges as a closed, repetitive loop that surprisingly delves more read-
ily into the past than the future. Halpern and Günel bemoan the dearth
of alternative images of the future and of future cities, as those in cir-
culation continually return to the familiar domains of science fiction or
city planning (2015, 23). Perhaps it is not a stretch to postulate that the
new London skyline may come to stand not only for the city’s renewal as
global city for a new transnational class but, eventually, for the city’s bur-
geoning ‘smart’ identity. It is a skyline that, after all, merely extends and
clarifies what is already in existence.
Against the backdrop of the discourses concerning London’s expand-
ing skyline, spy/action films such as Skyfall and Spectre privilege an
entirely different imaginary of the city in addressing the social and politi-
cal anxieties currently framing speculative visions of the future. As noted
by Christopher Lindner, the Bond formula is one of constant reinven-
tion, often forged in response to socio-economic circumstances, prevail-
ing social attitudes and concerns as well as a shifting cinematic and media
climate (2003, 1). As such, it hardly comes as a surprise that these films
offer narrativisations of cyber warfare and terrorist activity, in keeping
with a number of the dominant political concerns of our times. These
films are not explicitly oriented towards the future. However, the mat-
ter-of-fact position they assume with respect to the use of smart tech-
nologies, extending from hacking to surveillance systems to biometric
coding, suggests that the future is already here. These films essentially
offer cinematic ‘dry-runs’ of speculative future dystopias. And yet, the
London that appears in these films is a resurrected and reconfigured ver-
sion of its Victorian past.
For John Orr, the emergence of a ‘neo-Dickensian art of the city’
coincides with the revival of London as cinematic city in the 1980s
(2002, 104). The underside of the city, making a sustained appearance in
films such as My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Mona Lisa (1986) are
united in their depiction of narrative arcs featuring a wide cast of charac-
ters, including ‘the homeless, the casual, the migrant, the criminal, the
creative, the rich, the ambitious and the terrorist’ (Orr 2002, 105). This
newly minted cinematic city emerges in close proximity to the dawn of
London as global city, visualising the persistence of ‘low’ London despite
the city’s financial and architectural rise. It is a distinction that Murray
Fraser has described as one between a shiny, global London, exempli-
fied in urban developments linked to high finance, and a gritty, weighty,
messy London, encompassing social housing, multiculturalism and all
that remains incomplete (2003, 263). Like Orr, Fraser links the latter
vision of the city to the tradition of Dickens and Hogarth (Fraser 2003,
263). Historically speaking, a Victorian imaginary of the city returns
periodically across popular culture and, perhaps especially, during tran-
sitional moments. Frank Mort demonstrates how a Victorian dichotomy
of the over-world versus the underworld, mapped onto the opposition
between the Technicolour splendour of imperial London and the city’s
noir-ish underside, has been retooled across various historical moments
in response to shifting social, economic and political circumstances
(2006, 122). His primary example is North Kensington of the 1960s,
which came to be identified as a site of decay and decline as a result of
anxieties stemming from Caribbean migration and settlement in the area
(Mort 2006, 117).
What is the significance of this particular resurgence and corresponding
revision of ‘low London’ across these films, when the city itself is rising to
ever expanding heights? The most obvious answer lies in the genre’s post-
card aesthetic, where cities are featured in all of their iconicity for the pur-
poses of audience recognition. As is clear in the literature surveyed above,
London cannot quite rid itself of its popular identity as Victorian capital
and this remains true of the London that appears in these films, though
punctuated with contemporary imagery such as the London Eye. Global
London, in contrast, bears a close visual resemblance to other such cities
210 M. Guha
in its architectural repertoire of modernist skyscrapers and, hence, can-

not circulate as a distinctive image of the city. However, the often-explicit
political agenda of these films, which involves transforming all that is ‘old’
into something ‘new’, resonates with the parameters of the current politi-
cal climate that seeks to engage in a similar form of transfiguration.
Smart Dystopias: The Neo-Dickensian

Future in Skyfall and Spectre
The existing critical literature on Skyfall has reached a certain consen-
sus, which is that the film is steeped in an unabashed nostalgia for the
British Empire (Berberich, 2012; Hoa 2012). However, when London
is privileged as an analytical focal point in Skyfall and its companion film,
Spectre, what emerges is a productive twist on this reading. London is a
city that has long ceased to be simply associated with imperial nostalgia;
for geographer Peter Hall, the deregulation of the city’s financial markets
in the 1980s ‘lifted’ London away from the UK in its role as economic
centre (2009, 25). As Tim Butler and Chris Hamnett similarly note,
London has transformed from ‘national capital at the heart of a declin-
ing industrial economy and imperial power to what is arguably now the
“first city” of an emergent global economy’ (2009, 56). These com-
ments encapsulate a central conceit of global city studies, which claims
that these cities have more in common with each other than they do with
those located in the nations to which they belong. This assertion remains
resonant as Kaika’s assessment of the expansion of the London skyline
is demonstrative of how urban development and gentrification is catered
specifically towards a global, corporate gaze. As a result, London in these
films doesn’t simply speak to an imperial past but also to a global present
in ways that suggest its potential unravelling.
Both films reflexively mobilise a certain tension between ‘old’ and
‘new’ that has been much remarked upon by scholars and film critics
writing about Skyfall specifically, but not in relation to the film’s London
setting nor with respect to the way in which the film’s evocation of place
‘supports’ its position with regard to technology. Skyfall’s privileging of
London seems to have much to do with its status as the 50th anniver-
sary Bond film. The timing has proved fortuitous for the film’s director,
Sam Mendes, to revisit the conventions of the franchise but even more
precisely, as he states, to investigate the question of ‘what’s the point of
Bond, what’s the point of Bond movies?’ (Lambie 2012). What Mendes
identifies as the impetus to question the continued relevance of clandes-
tine field agents and by extension, the relevance of the franchise itself,
frames much of the reflexivity of Skyfall, carried through to Spectre. The
marked use of London and Scotland, in the case of Skyfall, returns Bond
to his national folds in a ‘back to basics’ approach that reinforces the
continued necessity of MI6 through the production of a dystopian view
of smart technologies, which unexpectedly dovetails with a wider critique
of smart city initiatives.
In Skyfall and Spectre, MI6 is in the midst of an upheaval, forced to
defend its methods to the British government in the former and made
to merge with MI5 in the latter, resulting in the shutting down of the
007 programme. In both films, field agents are the primary targets of
these ‘shake-ups’, as they are relegated to the status of all that is archaic
when confronted with enemies who stage attacks through digital means.
During M’s hearing in Skyfall, an MP dismisses MI6’s dependency on
‘human intelligence’ as ‘an old-fashioned belief’, while in Spectre, Mike
Denbigh, MI5’s C, lectures M on the obsolescence of the 007 pro-
gramme in comparison to the achievements of drone surveillance. The
establishment of this premise is circumvented in both films through a
demonstration of the absolute centrality of human agency and the Bond
figure in particular. In Skyfall, Bond’s use of a basic ‘smart gun’, a radio
transmitter and finally a knife that ends the life of Silva, stands in opposi-
tion to Silva himself, the cyber terrorist, who is surrounded by myriad
computers and complex digital code on his island lair. In Spectre, Bond
is able to defeat Blofeld by using the simplest of technological means,
including the activation of a bomb hidden in a wristwatch, which enables
his escape from his North African compound, and a handgun that he
uses to shoot down the helicopter Blofeld uses to leave London. In both
instances, the emphasis on very basic devices suggests that they, only in
conjunction with Bond himself, are powerful enough to overcome vil-
lains with more complex technological devices at their disposal. The nar-
rative redeems the field agent as the only means of working against
villainous terrorists who are mostly dependent upon digital technologies
in their nefarious acts.
This particular narrative impetus, traced across both films, is essen-
tially supported by the mise-en-scène so that images of London’s past
are also made new once again. Skyfall and Spectre reflexively mobilise a
212 M. Guha
distinction between the light and the shadows that ultimately privi-
leges the latter. This gesture is in keeping with the films’ valourisation
of MI6, as an agency that ‘works in the shadows’. This opposition can
be mapped, in spatial terms, across a largely vertical axis utilised in these
films, where the emphasis is not on what lies above the surface but can
be found underneath. Aerial views of the city, in their depiction of what
Charlotte Brunsdon has referred to as ‘Landmark London’ are fre-
quently used as establishing shots in these films, with a particular blend
of old and new as the Thames and Big Ben appear in the same frame as
the London Eye (Brunsdon 2007, 22). But once we descend into the
heart of the city, a much more specific distinction between ‘high’ and
‘low’ becomes discernable.
In a review of Skyfall, Ryan Gilbey makes a passing observation about
M’s status as Victorian heroine in this film, having been forced to give
up her ‘baby’ Silva to the Chinese authorities (Gilbey 2012). Yet the
Victorian aspects of Skyfall are more readily apparent in the film’s spa-
tial schema than in its plot. The underground location within which
MI6 retreats, which lie beneath the postmodern surface of their head-
quarters, is neo-Dickensian in its appearance. While characters note that
the underground bunker belonged to Churchill, the imagery itself signi-
fies as neo-Dickensian, with its exposed brick tunnels, archways and an
expressionist use of a blue and grey colour scheme with regard to cos-
tuming, all of which exudes an old-world Victorian aura in its revised
form. The neo-Dickensian spaces of the film extend beyond MI6 and
into the London Underground, where Bond chases Silva into the aban-
doned Victorian station.
A similar colour palette is drawn upon for scenes shot in the MI6
building before we witness it going up in flames, which ‘match’ the
gloomy exterior shots of the city so that a neo-Dickensian ‘London uni-
form’ is visually established above and below ground. Roger Deakins,
cinematographer of the film, has stated in numerous interviews that
the grey ‘London look’ of the film was carefully achieved, even in the
midst of bright sunny days that made it difficult to assert control over
the mise-en-scène (Giroux 2012; Mark Hope-Jones 2012). Mendes’
version of cinematic London taps into its popular associations with
gloom, rain and a certain dullness. This vision of the city is contrasted
with the other glamour cities on display in the film, including Shanghai,
depicted through shots that emphasise the city’s verticality and modern-
ist design. But, as Jen Hui Bon Hoa notes, the entrance to the skyscraper
in Shanghai where an action sequence commences is in fact shot in

London, at Broadgate Tower (2012, 7). That London can masquer-
ade as Shanghai is telling, given that some of the journalistic criticism
that has amassed in response to the burgeoning London skyline makes
a point of stating that London cannot possibly keep pace with the verti-
cal growth of cities like Shanghai (Moore 2012 and 2014). This detail
suggests an implicit desire to eschew the vertical grandeur of London by
allowing it stand for another city, in opposition to the ‘London of the
shadows’, which is the city that the film seeks to privilege; as M states
during her testimony, ‘Our world is not more transparent now. It’s more
opaque. It’s in the shadows. That’s where we must do battle.’
Spectre mobilises the opposition between ‘high’ and ‘low’ London
concretised in Skyfall. While MI6 is in the process of being relocated
to a high-rise, modernist structure that houses MI5, Q remains below
ground in a series of tunnels that can be reached from the Thames. This
space bears a strong visual resemblance to the bunker in Skyfall in its
exposed brick walls and row upon row of archways. The MI5 building,
which was digitally produced and inserted into establishing shots of the
city, is made to tower over the buildings next to it, which establishes a
sharp contrast with Q’s dwellings below. The interior of the MI5 build-
ing showcases a large, brightly lit spiral staircase, which suggests clarity
and transparency in accordance with Denbigh’s quest to bring ‘British
intelligence out of the shadows and into the light’. Denbigh refers to
the building as a ‘sophisticated data gathering system’, while much later
in the film, Blofeld describes his North African compound to Bond and
Madeleine as ‘information’. In both instances, these figures eclipse the
materiality of the edifices themselves, in a concerted effort to emphasise
the activities taking place in these buildings that involve complex, digi-
tal networks. And yet the film ensures that infrastructural constraints
eventually close in on these characters through the most material of
means; Denbigh falls to his death from the top floor of the building,
while Blofeld loses his eye when his compound is made to burn dur-
ing Bond and Madeleine’s escape. When we return to the ruins of the
MI6 building near the end of the film, its ground floor is transformed
from its postmodern veneer into a historical space that summarises the
‘Craig cycle’ as Bond walks through a long corridor where pictures of
those who have died, including Chiffre, Silva, M as well as Vesper Lynd,
hang on the walls. A structure affiliated with ‘high’ London in Skyfall is
grounded and made weighty in its evocation of the past of this particular
cycle, until is it completely destroyed by the end of the film.
214 M. Guha
As geographer Gavin Bridge argues, the cultural imaginary of the sub-

terranean world is rife with political possibility, of the ability to move and
to operate unseen, and to potentially ‘bring down the (infra) structures
of authority’ (2013, 55). But what does it mean for films that revolve
around clandestine government spy agencies to redeem what lies beneath
the surface and to essentially usurp the domain of the shadows for their
own purposes? To return to John Orr, if neo-Dickensian London is
home to marginalised figures that have been excluded from the city’s
global mandate, this particular reconfiguration of the neo-Dickensian
city reclaims this image of the city for the state, in its quest to eliminate
terror. In doing so, the films suggest power can also be wielded from
below in the digital era, where tracking and surveillance systems can
be operational from any position, as long as they do not eclipse human
agency. As such, the neo-Dickensian art of the city as featured in these
particular films comes to be associated with a regressive British national-
ism, solidified by the endings of both films so that the fate of London is
once again tied to that of the nation.
The second-to-last sequence in Skyfall involves Bond standing on a
rooftop, facing away from London’s identity as finance capital, where a
blurred glimpse of the Gherkin and construction cranes can be detected.
Instead, he is positioned towards historical landmarks such as Big Ben
and the Old War Office building, with the Union Flag blowing in the
wind (see Fig. 1). Once he is joined by Moneypenny, Bond says ‘I hate
to waste a view’. This sentiment finds a visual echo in these images as this
final sequence redeems a very specific vertical vision of the city, steeped
in an identifiable nationalist history. The final sequence of Spectre begins
with a series of stationary shots of London near Whitehall, complete with
views of the city through archways, and culminating with a shot of the
Union Flag on a rooftop. This film ends with an encounter between Q
and Bond in the bunker, suggesting that MI6 retains its foothold within
a subterranean domain. In both films, these final sequences follow from
scenes of utter chaos resulting from either the death or capture of the
villain. The restoration of London is a narrative priority of these films,
in ways that foreground a historical rather than contemporary image of
the city. It is almost as though moving underground to defeat any and
all threats of terror then allows for the films to offer surface images of
the city that overwhelmingly signify as British. In fact, all that is global in
these films, including their two non-British villains and the transnational
terror and surveillance networks run by SPECTRE, are characterised as
Fig. 1 James Bond (Daniel Craig) faces historical London landmarks in Skyfall
(2012)
threats, the latter deemed ‘Orwellian’ by M in Spectre. The films’ regres-

sive disavowal of a very particular image of the global tempers what we
might otherwise view as their potentially progressive critique of the dev-
astating effect of smart technologies that wreak havoc upon the world
largely unseen and undetected.
Conclusion
The London revival schemes surveyed in this chapter, some of which
are transpiring in the actual city and others that are imagined across a
number of spy films, shed light on the temporal dimension of speculative
visions of the future. London’s expanding skyline, in marked contradic-
tion to the Smart London Plan, is geared towards a global purview where
the only future imaginable is one where capitalism is in a continued state
of reinvention and renewal. Time constantly doubles back in this sce-
nario, in a presumably endless play of repetition/variation. However, the
Smart London Plan offers solutions for a problem that has only been par-
tially named; while the plan addresses London’s impending population
boom and corresponding infrastructural strain, it does not make mention
of the forms of social and economic polarisation that plague the city, suc-
cinctly encapsulated in London’s current high-rise boom.
In contrast, the films sidestep ‘the global’ while offering up a recon-
figured version of old-world London. If Orr positions the revival of a
216 M. Guha
neo-Dickensian art of the city as a means of fracturing the homogenous

depiction of a global London on the rise, the imagery in these films
operates as stylised, streamlined, commercial images of the city that now
connote a regressive British nationalism in the wake of London’s latest
global phase. Yet both films contain traces of another story. Skyfall’s Silva
is a fallen MI6 operative, left behind by M to be interrogated and sub-
sequently tortured by the Chinese government, while Blofeld is a rem-
nant of Bond’s own past, gone over to the dark side. Mike Denbigh in
Spectre is a double agent who attempts to launch a global surveillance
network on behalf of the organisation. These are familiar figures in a
particular narrative arc that has found expression in many assessments of
global terror networks. Namely, that state agencies and policies intended
to deter such activity have inadvertently provided the means for these
organisations to form in the first place. While these figures are neutral-
ised in these films, their very presence allows for the apprehension of an
alternative narrative of the British state’s involvement in the spread of
global terror networks, one that is neatly cast aside in favour of assert-
ing a nationalist narrative that demonises ‘global London’. As such, the
films’ flirtation with speculative futures is only ever a revival of its past,
leading to the production of a temporal loop that similarly doubles back
in a series of revisions.
If London is wedded to its global identity in the first set of revival
projects, the filmic variation examined in this study ties London to a
selective and populist understanding of the nation. But in an unex-
pected twist, the fate of London in these films is now seemingly the fate
of the city in the post-Brexit era. During a Conservative Party confer-
ence in October 2016, Prime Minister Theresa May declared, ‘If you
believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You
don’t understand what the very word “citizenship” means’ (Bearak
2016). May’s comments implicitly suggest that the prefix ‘global’ should
no longer be one of pride, leading one to postulate that London’s latest
global dreams may only come to fruition in limited form. This concern
has been articulated across journalistic registers. In a piece titled ‘What
Will Become of London after Brexit?’, Marc Champion writes:
The concern is that a nasty British divorce from the EU and its single mar-
ket could throw the globalized metropolis into reverse -- toward a recent
past when it was the depopulating seat of a lost empire, best known for
punk rock, race riots, bad food and crumbling infrastructure. (Champion
2016)
The reversal described above has already been forecast in these films,
most probably in keeping with Conservative leadership over the years
that has culminated in some degree with the Brexit vote. The films’ deep
forays into the trappings of British nationalism is an unexpected gesture
for the Bond franchise that traditionally flaunts a surface cosmopolitan-
ism in the midst of its overtly nationalist affiliations. Their impetus to
lend all that is ‘old’ a veneer of the ‘new’ is more than just an exercise in
city branding geared towards an audience’s familiarity with the icono
graphy of Victorian London. This particular gesture might also be situ-
ated within recent political trends that philosopher Alan Badiou has
commented upon in the wake of Donald Trump’s election as American
President. Speaking specifically about Trump, though linking his rise to
a burgeoning world order that features the likes of Russian President
Vladimir Putin, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi and we can now
add Theresa May, he argues that Trump’s appeal to ‘very old things’,
such as racism, and a certain machismo, is repurposed as something new,
chiming with the rhetoric of change (Badiou 2016).
These films unexpectedly speak to the present juncture, where nation-
alism, among the oldest of sentiments, is being repackaged and presented
as a necessary weapon in the fight against the newest of the enemies, the
global. In accordance with this discourse, the global is nearly a form of
shorthand for terrorism, cyber warfare and economic crisis. And while
this chapter has drawn upon scholarly insights regarding the exclusionary
effect produced by the city’s forays into global territory, the revival of an
equally exclusionary British nationalism cannot be lauded as an appropri-
ate solution to the city’s woes.
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London in Transition: Sites
of Melancholy
Charlotte Brunsdon
This chapter reflects on the potent combination of melancholy and nos-

talgia that can be associated with the cinematic presentation of change
in cities. While my starting point is the widely recognised network of
affiliations between the photographic arts, moving images and the muta-
bility of all things, my aim is to differentiate the tone of particular cin-
ematic engagements with the history of London. This is not an essay
about ‘Vanished London’ in general, or the sudden jolt of recognising a
long-demolished building when watching an old fiction film. Instead, it
is about filmic responses to the particular, planned, development of two
East London places, Hessel Street and the Lower Lea Valley, at two dif-
ferent periods. It takes for analysis two films, Robert Vas’s The Vanishing
Street (1961) and Paul Kelly’s What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day?
(2005), which have as their topic these locations—shortly to be subject
to radical transformation—and explores the complicated meshing of time
and place produced therein. I will be concerned with the peculiar ability
of film to offer its audiences images of what was once part of the material
C. Brunsdon (*) 
Department of Film and Television Studies, Millburn House, University of
Warwick, Coventry CV4 8UW, UK
e-mail: c.m.brunsdon@warwick.ac.uk

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64979-5_16
222 C. Brunsdon
city and is now gone, and with both the tense and tone of these medita-
tions. I want to tease out some distinctions in the modalities of cinematic
presentations of the ‘once, but no longer’ city: the city that used to be
there, the city that can be remembered, the city that can even still be
seen in these films.
Rather than tracing my way, in this short study, through the exten-
sive literature on melancholy and nostalgia, which ranges from Freud
and Walter Benjamin to Svetlana Boym (2001), I want to begin with one
of the pithier twentieth century comments on nostalgia, Lionel Bart’s
song, ‘Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be’. There is more than one ver-
sion of this song, originally written for Frank Norman’s play of the same
name, first performed in 1959, in Stratford, East London, by Theatre
Workshop under the direction of Joan Littlewood (Norman and Bart
1960; Holdsworth 2011, 195–201). In the play, which later transferred
to the West End, ‘Fings’ is sung twice, a proposition and reprise about
modern life, a chorus both nostalgic and explicit about the good and
bad old days. The particular context of ‘Fings’, named in the song, is
the recently published Wolfenden Report (1957), which recommended
changes to laws regarding both prostitution and homosexuality. The
song first appears in the play voiced by Lil, remembering when she was ‘a
bright young brass in Dean Street’, lamenting the new illegality of street
soliciting, ‘now it’s become an undercover game’ and the way that this
has changed the feel, and broken the union rate for the job. Her compan-
ion Fred complains about the taming of gambling schools and the restric-
tions on a ponce’s control of his girls. The bad old days they recall with
nostalgia, before there were ‘Cops from universities’ and ‘poofs in coffee
‘ouses’, when ‘ponces killed a lazy whore’, are characterised as a time of
clear social roles, of villains and toffs when: ‘There used to be class/Doin’
the town/Buying a bit o’vice,’ when gambling was run by organised
crime with police collusion. As with Frank Norman’s play, Bart’s lyrics
depend on Cockney slang and the sharp wit of patter. But it is not these
lyrics, or their development in the play’s finale, which are best remem-
bered now. The 1960 hit record by Max Bygraves retained the tune and
the nostalgic structure, but embodied the present–past comparison quite
differently, and much less obscenely. The original version evokes sets
of social relationships now made illegal, or dispersed through the indi-
vidualism of consumer society, as in the comment about the rise of the
football pools as a privatised form of gambling: ‘Big hoods now are little
hoods,/Gamblers now do Littlewoods’. The 1960 single instead evokes
LONDON IN TRANSITION: SITES OF MELANCHOLY 223
a changed built environment. These lyrics—as would be necessary for a

record seeking radio play in this period—make no reference to prostitu-
tion, ponces, homosexuality, organised crime or police corruptibility. It is
not the mores of the underworld of vice which are mourned, but chang-
ing leisure, transport and fashion; bowling alleys replacing the local palais,
with cars, traffic jams and parking meters instead of trams.
Apart from the accomplishment of Bart’s lyrics, and the catchy tune,
the appeal of this song lies in the familiarity of its sentiment. Things
are never what they used to be, and it is precisely because of this that
it was possible to retain the song’s central proposition but bowdler-
ise the words to make it more widely appealing. The astringency of the
‘Wolfenden version’ comes from the juxtaposition of the nostalgia of the
chorus with the brutality of the life depicted; this contrast is shifted in
the Max Bygraves hit version. This makes the nostalgia of the hit ver-
sion more generalised and sentimental. But the content of the shift is
also significant in other ways. What is lost changes from a culture to a
place, from lived relations to physical structures. This chapter suggests
that it is important, when faced with the cinematic evocation of feelings
induced by the mutability of ‘fings’, to ask what is being mourned, by
whom, in what context? This precision, as can be seen from the example
of Bart’s song, is the only way to avoid the blurring of particular losses
into a more sentimental lament.
I will explore these questions in analysis of two films which have
a different tense to ‘Fings’, which mourns what has already gone. The
Vanishing Street and What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day?, while
made nearly fifty years apart, share a tense. They address cityscapes which
are about to disappear, preparing the terrain for future nostalgia, but are
themselves still caught in a present-day melancholy. They are melancholy
films which are not yet nostalgic.
Mid-Century Redevelopment: The Vanishing Street

The temporality of The Vanishing Street is inscribed in the present tense
of its title. A street which is both there, and disappearing. While it is
not till the end of the film that the demolition trucks move in and the
walls of former homes are ripped open, this destiny is signalled from
the beginning. The surveyor’s cross hatch across the lens which appears
in the second minute is revealed to have a particular purpose, and the
smoke-stained brick houses and shops of Hessel Street, London, E.1.
224 C. Brunsdon
are framed against new tower blocks just behind them. It is only a mat-
ter of time, and this time turns out to be the length of the film: twenty
minutes.
The Vanishing Street was shot in 1961 by the Hungarian Robert Vas,
who had in 1959 made Refuge England about his first day, as a refu-
gee, in London. Refuge England was included in the final Free Cinema
programme at the National Film Theatre in London, and, although
The Vanishing Street is later, it shares many characteristics—such as the
respectful attention to working-class life and the impressionist editing—
with the other short documentaries of the Free Cinema programmes.1
Refuge England provides a sense of a London as many places: stations,
river, suburbs, landmarks and crowds, all made strange by the juxtaposi-
tion of city images with Péter Timár’s reprises of Hungarian folk-songs
played on a recorder. The voice-over declares that in this, the filmmaker’s
first day in the city that he knew must become his home, he ‘observed
… as a child’. This child’s view is drawn to surreal detail and unexpected
juxtaposition, all the time capturing the way in which purposeful grown-
ups are oblivious to their surroundings. The later film concentrates
instead on just one street, and the camera’s gaze is more integrated, less
detached from, and foreign to, what surrounds it. Refuge England is suf-
fused with the longing to be recognised as a fellow human (‘What do
you want? This is our town’), and to be given succour, ‘Where will they
say to me, sit down, have a rest?’ The Vanishing Street in contrast has
found a mainly Jewish community in which many different types of per-
sons co-exist. This street is heimlich.
The Vanishing Street, which was part funded by the Jewish Chronicle
and the BFI, announces itself as a documentation of Jewish Whitechapel
through the song with which it opens, ‘Whitechapel, Oh My
Whitechapel’, heard over black leader tape before any images appear.
This Klezmer-influenced song, with both Yiddish and English refrains,
continues over three turn-of-the-century photographs with which the
film begins: a street view of a bustling market; a family portrait with eve-
ryone respectable in best clothes; and a less formal image of a market
stall selling bowler hats. These photographs establish a history to the
vanishing street of the title. Each is marked by age, both in what is rep-
resented (horse-drawn transport; Victorian/Edwardian costume; bowler
hats) and through the quality of the images, a bit faded, creased, one
clearly taken from a publication. These are old photographs of an estab-
lished place and way of life. From these photographs, there is a cut to the
present day of moving images with shots of passers-by—including two

Orthodox Jewish men (with beards and hats)—in a street with market
stalls and shops, which is identified, with a close-up held on the street
sign, as Hessel Street. This little opening sequence, not much more
than a minute long, forms a prologue to the film as whole, establishing
place and invoking history through the intermingling of still and moving
images, song and street sounds. The melancholy violin of ‘Whitechapel,
oh my Whitechapel’ seems to be contradicted as the sound track changes
to stallholders’ shouts in the busy market enticing Londoners to buy
banal household goods and exotic fruit like pineapples and bananas.
The inaugural narrative event of the film lies in the shot which suc-
ceeds the close-up on the street sign of Hessel Street, and is conveyed
formally through a repeated view of the street scene, this time shown
through the cross-hairs of the surveyor’s lens. The enigma of the film is
the relation between this alien point of view, and the succeeding images
which capture the routines through which stallholders and shopkeep-
ers display their wares for the day’s trading—the arranging of a row of
cushions; the building of a display of fruit; the hanging, one by one, of
dresses high up outside the shop window where they can be seen but not
touched. The observational camera captures the attention with which
these rituals are performed, while the cutting together of the different
instances demonstrates their repeated and regular status. The trading
street, both vendors and punters readying themselves for bargaining and
purchases, seems to promise a familiar city-film structure: ‘a day in the
life’. Most of the film’s running length is composed of images from the
street, or inside the various businesses of the street (a barber’s, sewing-
machinists, a chicken abattoir) with a central section in a synagogue,
returning again to the street. In this latter part of the film, which, in a
traditional day-in-the-life structure would involve the end of work, dusk
falling and lamps being lit, it is gradually revealed that the ending for
Hessel Street will be more permanent, with shop windows declaring
‘Closing Down Sale’, and shoppers discussing ‘they call this the slum
clearing’. The return to the surveyors measuring their mysterious virtual
lines, some shots of models of pristine tower blocks and footage of the
machines of demolition leave no ambiguity about the end of the day for
this street.2
In the context of a consideration of social change and cinematic
London, there are three things to note. Firstly, the way in which the
structure of the film draws on the medium’s capacity to present sound
226 C. Brunsdon
Fig. 1 The Vanishing Street (1961): The new rears up behind the old
and image to make an elegy for Hessel Street which has a peculiar tense.
The market street is both shown to the viewer—who may recognise it,
but who may also never have heard of it—and shown to be about to dis-
appear. The street is given to the viewer with the assurance that it will be
taken away. The enigma of the title, giving a present tense to the disap-
pearance of not a rabbit, or coin, or playing-card, but a whole street, is
shown to be not magic, but social policy.
Secondly, the film employs two key tropes of cinematic 1960s rede-
velopment: the demolition machines moving in on Victorian terraced
housing, and the juxtaposition of the old, ruined terraces with the pris-
tine slab and tower blocks that will replace them (see Fig. 1). The first
of these, which recurs across 1960s British cinema, and is not limited to
London-set films, is most dramatically produced using film of the wreck-
ing ball, as seen in the self-conscious employment of the trope at the
beginning of the 1967 film The London That Nobody Knows, where the
swing of the wrecking ball is repeated to a rhythmic cut. Although there
is no wrecking ball in The Vanishing Street, the final images of the dig-
gers and bulldozers moving into the fabric of the houses, tearing bricks
away while pathetic mementoes of the homes they once were flap in the
disturbed air, the trope is unmistakeable. The destruction of redevelop-
ment, and particularly the exposed interiors of domestic spaces, reso-
nates with the memory of wartime bombing, and its classic tropes of the
revealed interior in the ravaged street, as explored by Leo Mellor (2011)
in his analysis of literary bombsites. The redevelopment version of this
trope though, stresses not the city subject to airborne attack and the sur-
rounding ruins, but instead the wilful penetration of diggers, bulldozers
and the wrecking ball.
The tower block/terrace juxtaposition, the second trope of redevel-
opment, has also become familiar. The drama of this contrast depends
mainly on volumes and textures: the tall, vertical blocks juxtaposed with
the low, horizontal terraces; the grimy, dark, patterned, uneven detail of
the houses against the pale, smooth, monochrome of the right-angled
concrete. The height contrast becomes more eloquent in Britain after
the 1956 Housing Subsidy Act, which offered incentivising additional
funding to local authorities for every storey above the sixth (Hanley
2007, 93). In The Vanishing Street the antiseptic utopianism of the tower
blocks is emphasised in a couple of shots by using little architects’ mod-
els, quite abstracted from the surrounding space of the city.
Finally, there is the question, as Catherine O’Flynn (2007) puts it in
her Birmingham-set redevelopment novel, of ‘what was lost’. Although
the final images of The Vanishing Street are of the material destruction of
buildings (which the editing encourages us to believe are Hessel Street
itself), it is not buildings on which the film concentrates. The film very
carefully situates its action within Hessel Street, but within that location,
most of the images are of people. In particular, there are repeated close-
ups of the people who shop and work there. These are most often shots
of individuals as they meditate on possible purchases—beautiful por-
traits of middle-aged women caught in moments of reflection—or two-
shots of conversations. These can be between punter and seller or, in a
sequence where the film’s sponsor is visible, discussions about news seen
in shared copies of the Jewish Chronicle (see Fig. 2). Births, marriages,
photographs: all are commented on. These conversations, like the ritual
laying-out of goods at the film’s opening, are presented as matters of
habit, of repetition, of the regular interactions of the market street. And
it is the fragmentary soundtrack of one of these conversations, which,
228 C. Brunsdon
Fig. 2 The Vanishing Street (1961): Two women discuss news in the Jewish
Chronicle
towards the end of the film, presents the local view of what is to come:
‘It’s all coming down’, ‘They call this the slum clearing’. Although it is
the buildings that will go, the loss, the balance of the film suggests, is
these habitual, neighbourly conversations and social rituals. What was
lost is a located community.
Olympic Redevelopment and the Lea Valley

The Vanishing Street belongs to a body of work from the 1950s and
1960s, across literature, film, television, music and the social sciences,
which registers the impact of policy initiatives about slum clearance and
urban redevelopment. Best known academically is Michael Young and
Peter Willmott’s 1957 sociological classic, Family and Kinship in East
London, which documented the violent transformation of Bethnal Green
family life through dispersal to new estates in Woodford (‘Greenleigh’);
but more popularly, the back-catalogue of The Kinks offers a germane

commentary. In the context of a consideration of the cinema and social
change in London, The Vanishing Street serves to exemplify this work
about mid-century reconstruction and development, and to be con-
trasted with later losses imagined in the redevelopment of East London
for the 2012 Olympics.
The contextual difference between these two periods is significant.
Vas’s film shared with other Free Cinema work the liberation of the new
lighter 16 mm cameras. This enabled the mid-century documentation
of a modernising London—and Britain—in which the role of the film-
maker was often to record ways of life on the cusp of transformation.
As we have seen, Vas’s film inscribes this transition into the structure of
the film, but planned redevelopment was a ubiquitous phenomenon, and
as Amy Sargeant has pointed out, its traces can be found both purpose-
fully (Sparrows Can’t Sing [1962]) and almost incidentally in a range of
1960s fiction films (2005, 252).The bulldozer, the wrecking ball, the
crane and the building site provide a visual and aural guarantee of the
authenticity of London settings in 1960s cinema, from the office build-
ings of Victim (1961) to the excavations of Quatermass and the Pit
(1967).
The temporal frame for film responses to the 2012 Olympics was
rather different, in that the official timetable for delivery of the games,
with an announcement of the London venue in July 2005, gave a precise
seven-year period for the development of the designated East London
site. Instead of a diffuse, geographically dispersed phenomenon over
which sociologists, politicians and cultural commentators puzzled (Was
the working class disappearing? Who was ‘the affluent worker’?), the
Olympics were going to take place in particular places at a particular
time. That parts of East London were now home to artists and other
front-line gentrifiers, and that the technologies of filming and other cul-
tural production were so transformed, produced a different dynamic and
an outpouring of responses. This can be exemplified in work such as
Emily Richardson’s film Transit (2006) (see Newland 2010), the pho-
tographs of Stephen Gill’s Archaeology in Reverse (2007) and Braden
and Campany’s Adventures in the Lea Valley (2016), and the anthol-
ogy, The Art of Dissent (Powell and Marrero-Guillamón 2012). The two
Paul Kelly/Saint Etienne films about the Lower Lea Valley (the principal
Olympic site) I will discuss are more explicitly outsiders’ films than this,
although part of a body of work repeatedly concerned with London,
230 C. Brunsdon
music and memory (Burke 2010; Sandhu 2013). In the later of the two
films, Seven Summers (2012), the narrator emphasises his unfamiliarity
with the designated site, declaring that ‘No-one I knew had ever been
there’, and pointing out that much of it appeared in the London A–Z as
‘large white space the size of the West End’. This exploring voice, while
it echoes many a visit to the East End of London, means that there is
something of both discovery and demonstration in the project of each
film, a demonstration which, like The Vanishing Street, is of a place which
will no longer exist when the film is being watched.
What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day? too, as its title suggests,
has a day in the life structure.3 This day, though, as the use of BBC
Radio footage as soundtrack over the black leader of the opening informs
the viewer, is a particular day, ‘Thursday 7th July’, the day after the
announcement, triumphally received in official channels, that London
was to host the 2012 Olympics. With footage mainly shot over a three-
week period during the school holidays later that summer, Mervyn Day
proposes itself, in a subtitle, as ‘A film about the Lower Lea Valley’, part
of the principal Olympic site. The film has the ghost of structure in the
paper round of its silent adolescent male protagonist, Mervyn, whose
bicycle journey around the Valley, Hackney Marshes, Carpenters Road
and Hackney Wick is accompanied by a variety of London voices, includ-
ing two identified in the credits as Mervyn’s mother (Linda Robson)
and his grandfather (David Essex). The slightness of the narrative struc-
ture of the paper round, beginning at a newsagents, taking Mervyn to a
range of unusual sites, through a case of mistaken identity from which he
then flees and is declared missing, to its undramatic resolution in a diner,
permits other ghosts to populate the soundtrack. These voices, which
include residents and historians of the area, are edited across the image in
ways which sometimes counterpoint, sometimes explain and sometimes
reminisce, while Mervyn’s errand intermittently motivates the film’s trav-
elogue of the Lea Valley.
Like The Vanishing Street, What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day?
is a film made with the knowledge of imminent change to the views it
offers to its audience. With a fictional setting on an actual day, the film is
in some ways already in retrospect which can be seen with the occasional
inclusion of ‘post-announcement’ campaigning banners, ‘2012 DON’T
BLOW OUR JOBS’ and ‘2012 KILLING LOCAL BUSINESSES’, as
well as in its tone, meshing voice, sound and music over its sequence of
composed, static-camera images.
It is proposed by one of the soundtrack voices, towards the end of the

film (37 mins) that what is peculiar about the Lea Valley is that although
it is historically important, there is ‘no sense of past achievement’, that all
is lost, there is nothing there. The fictional (Mervyn’s day) and real (the
landscape) time of the film is caught between these losses of the past and
those anticipated. Mervyn (Noah Kelly) himself, a lanky, slightly spotty
adolescent, speaks only once (to swear), and his face remains blank and
inexpressive throughout, provoking a final reference to him as ‘laughing
boy’ in the last scene. This blank, itinerant central figure though, who
seems to move affectlessly through the landscape, provides an embodi-
ment of these mute, empty tableaux, the selection of shots of different
scale which comprise the image track. Just as it is impossible to know
what Mervyn is thinking, so too do these images of abandoned ware-
houses, fading signs, tended and untended allotments, empty football
pitches, moored barges, buses, lock-ups and edgelands keep themselves
to themselves. The method of the film becomes partly one of unlock-
ing this muteness, revealing something of the lives lived here, the trades
practiced and modes of sociality and collectivity. This is done mainly by
voice-over, often by Mervyn’s relatives, each voiced by an actor with
East London associations, or by other residents, reminiscing about paper
rounds and football teams and local names and practices: ‘We just call
it the Wick’, ‘Before the war, they used to keep sheep on the marshes’.
These local voices are counterposed with voices more like classical voice-
of-god documentary narration, explaining aspects of the area’s his-
tory. Over images of dereliction, the audience is told that both plastic
and petrol were invented in the Lea Valley, while an odd building with
bricked-in windows is identified as a multi-storey stable to cope with the
huge numbers of horses in the area. The ‘all sorts’ who work the Manor
Gardens allotments are invoked over images of derelict sheds and weedy
plots.4 The static images are revealed as traces in two temporalities: traces
of what was once there, and as images, all that will be left of what is now
there.
The duration of the film then, seeks to build an engagement with the
Lea Valley. Its narration, and sequence of images, lap over a history of
light engineering, invention, social reform, industrial action (the Match
Girls’ strike) and political organisation (the birth of the Labour Party),
extrapolating these stories from often abandoned buildings and enig-
matic plaques. This history is interlaced with other histories, remem-
bered arrivals, like, in one resident’s words ‘the invasion’ of the Parisian
232 C. Brunsdon
left bank, when the artists turned up to establish studios and workshops
late in the twentieth century, turning Carpenters Road (‘the street of
many smells’) into an area with one of the highest per capita populations
of artists in Europe. The narration seeks to make the images speak, and
also to reward scrutiny. The fading LESNEY sign is explicated through
memories of Matchbox cars, of working on the assembly lines, and
the odd toy that went home in a pocket. But this mosaic of memory is
caught in foreboding: ‘Once they start building, you never get it back’.
Tom Dyckhoff, writing a couple of years after the film was made,
characterises it as an elegy, ‘a kind of grieving’ (c. 2008, 13). While now,
in the time after the London 2012 Olympics, the film is ‘a lament’ for
‘a landscape and a way of life’, what is so interesting about it is the way
in which it catches this landscape when change is imminent, and con-
textualises it within a history of changes. The film proposes that these
scenes lost will be the occasion of grief. The inarticulate adolescent hero
provides a narrative motivation for a sense of time becalmed in the long,
eventless horizon of the summer holidays. Although much has happened
here, grass and buddleia have grown over much of it, just as the weather
has eroded signs, wood has rotted and locks have rusted. Dyckhoff
describes the Lower Lea Valley as ‘a sort of urban back-of-the-sofa’ (c.
2008, 15), and the film unearths its unpredictable mixture of trophies
which bear testimony to those who have sat there.
This sense of an uneventful, summery present, a landscape unaware,
just like Mervyn, of what is going to happen, articulated through a com-
bination of spatially coherent sequences and more abstract montages, is
disrupted by a different kind of history introduced by the radio. BBC
Radio Four’s 6am Today programme opens the film on the day when the
reality of the Olympic bid transforms all this landscape into something
of limited life span, and the first part of the 45-minute film is conducted
within this 7 July. Nineteen minutes in, though, Mervyn catches another
radio news bulletin, at 11am, when the broadcaster is beginning to iden-
tify the damage of the London bomb attacks on the public transport sys-
tem at nine o’clock that morning.This is a quite different 7 July (2005),
and unlike Mervyn and the news broadcaster, the audience is likely to
know exactly what caused ‘the disruption’ in central London.
Seven Summers is a much shorter piece of work—a mere 8 minutes—
again set in the Lea Valley, but with the Olympics imminent. The film
reuses some of the 2005 footage shot for Mervyn Day, but, seven years
later, can juxtapose it with the new-build of the Olympic site: the fences,
the surveillance tower and the residences. Without the fictional device
of Mervyn, the piece is a more explicit meditation on the transforma-
tion of the Lower Lea Valley in which racing cyclists serve as the shock
troops of the elimination of the local. Extreme close-ups of wheel hubs,
a Soviet-style recognition of the beauty of man and machine in purpose-
ful motion, and shots of a peloton of racing cyclists, punctuate the film.
The always moving cyclists are sometimes shot through extreme close-up
of grasses and wild-flowers. The fragility of these edgeland weeds, their
in-placeness as they sway in the breeze, or glitter with raindrops caught
in spiders’ webs, is contrasted with the almost post-human drive of the
peloton with its disregard for its surroundings. The weeds/cyclists shots
thus serve as a metaphor for the relationship between the global ‘scam of
scams’, as Iain Sinclair called the Olympics (2006), and the local particu-
larity of its site. ‘Beware Racing Cyclists’, as a shot of one of the signs,
warns.
Seven Summers, like Mervyn Day, is conscious of the paralysing weight
of refusing change, but the apprehension of past, present and future is
slightly different. Each film tries to retain its poise between document-
ing the beauty and meaning of what is—and is about to be—lost with an
understanding of necessary mutability. These are films which know they
are working the terrain of nostalgia with exquisite images of disappearing
edgelands, and try to pull back from wallowing in imminent loss, often
through explicit commentary on the spoken sound track, although the
music sometimes works in other ways. David Essex’s concluding com-
ment in Mervyn Day exemplifies this resolve, ‘People say it’s all going
to change, but the Lea Valley has always been about change’, voiced as
it is over Mervyn standing in the silty foreshore of the Thames gazing
at the lunar beauty of the Millennium Dome. Seven Summers is tougher,
declaring at the end of its introductory sequence, ‘In its way, the der-
eliction was beautiful, but if ever a place needed regeneration, this was
it’. In this film, the use of 2005 images of places now disappeared adds
another layer to its own description of the Valley as ‘abandoned but full
of ghosts’. Now those ghostly abandoned places have been erased, and
the only trace is the film itself. But, again, there is a determined reprise
in the invocation of the future, with the narrator’s query ‘What are they
aiming for? What are they hoping to get out of it?’ over images of the
gigantic tin shed of the Westfield shopping centre and a close-up of secu-
rity cameras. The film pulls itself out of stasis by gesturing towards the
most important questions which can be put about change in cities, which
234 C. Brunsdon
Fig. 3 Seven Summers (2012): The coots in their kingdom
is about the type of change that is most desirable, and how it might be
achieved. It is only a gesture; the ugliness of the shopping shed and the
ubiquity of the CCTV cameras is clearly offered as a poor substitute for
the pair of coots swimming about their little kingdom of an old plank
floating in algae which have appeared intermittently throughout the film
(see Fig. 3).
Conclusion
These two Paul Kelly/Saint Etienne films, which both make significant
use of the band’s music in their creation of mood, work over the same
territory to slightly different effect. In Mervyn Day, the anticipation of
change is used as a device to recover the history of the Lea Valley and
to pay attention to what is there. It seeks to memorialise a local land-
scape. In Seven Summers, this work is reprised, but the indexical status
of the images has shifted—their referent has already disappeared—and
the international icons of the Olympic site erupt into the image and
landscape. In each case though, what is lost is rather different to The
Vanishing Street. There, the street of the title was shown to be so much
more than buildings, and to be a place where a community met and
remade itself daily. In the Lea Valley films, it is the existing emptiness
of the landscape that is most striking. While there is a manifest commit-

ment to including the voices of the allotment holders and long-term resi-
dents, mostly what is visible are abandoned places. If The Vanishing Street
records one move in the mid-century de-territorialisation of the working
class, Mervyn Day roams over a post-industrial edgeland, a landscape of
small particularities which is already made and marked by previous, now
forgotten losses. Here, it is the further loss of the already insignificant
and disregarded which is being anticipated.
The disappearing ‘Fings’ with which each of these films is concerned
are historically identifiable, and each film seeks to involve the viewer in a
meditation about change in London. To watch is to become involved in
the reanimating of places and people now gone. For the duration of the
film, these places are restored: the chickens are still being slaughtered,
the haggling continues, the cafés serve a full English, the grasses wave
in the wind and the coots live their little life.5 And when the film fin-
ishes, all is gone again. In this movement, from reanimation to loss, is
found the more general quality of cinema’s engagement with what Laura
Mulvey has called ‘Death at 24 frames a second’ (2006). The melan-
cholies of these different redevelopments, involve the recognition of the
irreversibility of time. But, as Roger Luckhurst has argued in his critique
of the resonance of ‘the discourse of spectralized modernity’ in contem-
porary discussion of Londons, only a ‘historicized mourning work can
work through the compulsive repetitions of a structure of melancholic
entrapment’ (2002, 535). Despite their shared reanimation of things
which aren’t what they used to be, these are different melancholies about
different disappearances of parts of London. While the chorus is compel-
ling, the content of the verses matters in understanding what is happen-
ing to the city.
Notes
1. The films, which were united as ‘Free Cinema’ through their exhibition
in a series of programmes at the National Film Theatre in London, were
‘made free from the pressures of the box-office or the demands of propa-
ganda’ (Dupin c. 2008, 1) and are now available in the BFI’s Free Cinema
collection DVD curated by Christophe Dupin.
2. Hessel Street was not fully demolished in the 1960s. Nine Victorian ter-
raced houses/shops were still standing on the west side in January 2017.
See also Martin Brady’s six-minute film, Hessel Street (2007).
236 C. Brunsdon
3. The film was originally made for a one-off screening with a live perfor-
mance by Saint Etienne, as Paul Kelly points out in an informative discus-
sion of its production (Kelly and Elborough 2013: 50–52).
4. See Gillian Evans (2016) on the Manor Gardens Allotments, evicted in
2007, with a partial alternative provided elsewhere in 2016.
5. Chickens were still being slaughtered in Hessel Street in 2017, now by
halal, rather than kosher butchers, but possibly in the same premises. See
Dench et al. (2006) on the transition from a Jewish to a Bangladeshi East
End.
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East–West: Reflections on the Changing
Cinematic Topography of London
Ian Christie
Watching a film is like visiting a city; and increasingly the experiences are
interwoven, as our travels are guided by on-screen orientation, preparing
us for what we will ‘actually’ see. This is the theme of a highly suggestive
essay by Roger Odin, which has become ever more pertinent since its
first appearance in 2007, as both our travel and our tourism have become
increasingly screen-dependent. In this reflection on recent shifts in the
cultural geography of London on screen, I want draw upon Odin’s cen-
tral insight:
To visit a city, or see a film, is to enter a world or more accurately ‘to pro-
duce’ a world, a ‘diegesis’ as the film theorist would say. In both cases, the
viewer and the visitor function as enunciators who build this world from
the signs provided. (Odin 2015, 71)
Odin acknowledges his own debt to Michel de Certeau’s ‘pedestrian

enunciation’, in the latter’s classic account of ‘walking in the city’. But he
I. Christie (*) 
Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK
e-mail: ianchristi@gmail.com

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64979-5_17
240 I. Christie
adds to this a number of ideas drawn from such cultural critics as Roland
Barthes, Serge Daney and Marc Augé, as well as his own perception:
If the work of a fiction film is to make me resonate with the events nar-
rated … all the work of the city is to make me resonate with the speech
she wants to convey, a speech I apprehend through the narrative I build by
visiting it.
So how is this relevant to the accumulated history of London films ‘visit-

ing’ the city’s East and West End?
To put this in perspective, we should recall that long before narrative
films succeeded in taking viewers vicariously to notorious parts of cities,
the idea of such tourism was relatively common. As early as 1884, the
New York Times reported:
Slumming commenced in London … with a curiosity to see the sights,

and when it became fashionable to go ‘slumming’ ladies and gentlemen
were induced to don common clothes and go out in the highways and
byways to see people of whom they had heard, but of whom they were as
ignorant as if they were inhabitants of a strange country. (New York Times
September 14, 1884)
By the beginning of the twentieth century, London’s East End had

become the focus of a distinctive international literary genre, greatly
boosted by the notoriety of the ‘Whitechapel murders’ attributed to Jack
the Ripper in the late 1880s. And although Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde (1886) did not propose any specific loca-
tions, the conjunction of its tale of violent, apparently motiveless mur-
ders with the reality of the Whitechapel killings undoubtedly contributed
to the association between violence and the East End.
Jack London described in his 1902 exposé of poverty in London’s
East End, People of the Abyss, how a Hackney Cab driver denied know-
ing the way, which he compared ironically to the likelihood of similar
ignorance by ‘Thomas Cook and Son path-finders and trail-clearers, liv-
ing sign-posts to all the World’ (London 1902, 1). Foreign visitors to
London, whether in search of titillation—or of witnessing charitable
experiments in helping the unfortunate denizens of Whitechapel, Stepney
and Limehouse—would routinely visit these districts. Further additions
to the literary canon included Frank Wedekind’s Pandora’s Box (1904),
EAST–WEST: REFLECTIONS ON THE CHANGING … 241
in which his heroine Lulu meets her fate at the hands of a Ripper-style
killer; and in the same year, Marie Belloc Lowndes’ story The Lodger.
Both of these would become widely known through screen adaptations
at the end of the 1920s: Hitchcock’s The Lodger (1926) and Pabst’s
Pandora’s Box (1929). But, even earlier, a story from Thomas Burke’s
collection Limehouse Nights (1916), ‘The Chink and the Child’, provided
the basis for D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919); and the Ripper fig-
ure would appear as an already notorious figure in an episode of Paul
Leni’s Waxworks (1924).
East Is East
The fact that these Hollywood, Weimar and, indeed, Islington versions
of East London were distinctly Gothic confections adds to the unreality
of the cinematic East End. For those living far from the densely packed
slum districts around Brick Lane, it had become a place of fantasy and
nightmare. Yet it was an Anglo-German film produced in 1929 that pro-
vided the most plausible view of East End immigrant life, seen in dra-
matic opposition to the glamorous West End evoked by the film’s title.
Piccadilly was made by British International Pictures (BIP) as part of an
ambitious effort to ‘internationalise’ British production, based on a script
by the popular novelist Arnold Bennett, with two female stars imported
from Hollywood, and three of its key production personnel from Berlin.
The film’s fate has been unusual, and instructive. Made on the cusp
of the ‘talkie’ revolution, it was essentially a belated silent, with a sound
prologue hastily, and apparently clumsily, added for its US appearance in
July 1929. American reviews were enthusiastic, welcoming with surprise
‘a truly fine British picture’ (Photoplay) and describing it as a ‘good pic-
ture’ (Variety); and the New York Times quoting with approval the ver-
dict of the National Board of Review: ‘the first serious contender of our
American product to reach these shores from English studios’ (July 15).
British reviews were impressed by the film’s scale and expense, and by its
visual style. Only the avant-garde ‘little magazine’ Close Up was dismiss-
ive: ‘a typical British picture … and therefore one of the world’s worst’
(Castle 1929, 46).
With the talkies firmly established, Piccadilly seems to have been
quickly forgotten, until it was restored in 2003, reappearing as a ‘dis-
covery’, equipped with a striking new jazz-inflected score by Neil Brand
that evoked the popular entertainment idiom of the 1920s. By now,
242 I. Christie
its original star, Gilda Gray, had long been forgotten, while Anna May
Wong was ready to be discovered as a rare example of an Asian female
star in Anglo-American cinema. What has appealed strongly to audiences
during the last fifteen years (since 2003) is the film’s dialectic of a glam-
orous West End, whose kitchens depend on ‘invisible’ East-End workers,
but whose entertainment can also draw on the exotic appeal of a Chinese
dancer. This evokes the long history of affluent London’s dependence
upon a reservoir of immigrant and proletarian labour, traditionally
housed out of sight in its ‘East End’.
And in one extraordinary and unprecedented scene the growing
infatuation of the nightclub’s English owner with the Chinese dancer
he has discovered in his own kitchen gives us an unusual opportunity to
‘visit’ multiracial Limehouse and experience its sexual frisson. Echoing
an early shot of fashionable patrons at the bar of the Piccadilly Club, a
tracking shot along the counter of a raffish pub reveals a gallery of varied
types, culminating in the nightclub owner, Valentine, tentatively clasp-
ing Shosho’s hand. This is followed by a lively scene of communal danc-
ing in the same pub, which is disrupted when the manager intervenes
to separate an English girl from a black man, reminding him that this is
‘not allowed’, and asking the girl if she’s blind to the man’s colour. But
instead of meekly accepting this enforcement of social convention, the
girl argues back, vigorously and apparently with scorn, asserting her right
to dance with whoever she chooses, before stalking out of the pub with
a group of followers.1 Shosho and Valentine take the hint, that their liai-
son is likely to attract similar disapproval, and discreetly withdraw, pass-
ing under a railway arch to reach Shosho’s lodging, where she presses a
key into Valentine’s hand. This sustained challenge to the conventions of
interracial sexual propriety on screen can still surprise audiences today—
making the film’s rediscovery in an era of changed attitudes towards
sexuality and ethnicity highly significant,2 also distancing it from the
convention of a Limehouse replete with Orientalist cliché, as in Griffith’s
Broken Blossoms or successors such as Alexander Hall’s Limehouse Blues
(1934), or indeed the updated ‘underworld London’ of Brecht and
Weill’s Threepenny Opera.3
In contrast to the film’s Limehouse, described by Shosho to Valentine
as ‘our Piccadilly’, the West End of the night club is evoked at the begin-
ning of the film by means of an innovative semiotic overture that uses
bus advertisements, illuminated signs and building facades to proclaim
‘Piccadilly’ as both the title, and a locus of entertainment (Lennon 2012).
Here, unusually, the two semiotic strands that Odin links in his essay are
both components of the film. Its opening montage is literally a ‘space of
signs intentionally designed to position’ us as viewers of a film which we
also approach with expectations already created by the title ‘Piccadilly’.
If London’s East End is topographically imprecise, so too is its West
End. Both designations in their modern usage date from the early nine-
teenth century, and are arguably co-determined (Mills 2001). While
the East is a crowded space of immigration and poverty, centred on
Whitechapel, the West, with Piccadilly Circus as its emblematic hub,
signifies pleasure and affluence, a space of consumption, often con-
spicuous, and of entertainment, such as is offered by the eponymous
Piccadilly club. It is in fact a malfunction of the Piccadilly club’s luxury
service, when a customer complains about an unwashed plate, which
sends the owner on what will become a double voyage of discovery.
Going down to the kitchen to establish what has gone wrong with the
dishwashing, he finds Shosho, performing for the scullery staff. And
what has been distraction and parody of the ‘real’ entertainment pro-
vided by the star performer will soon replace that star, as if underlining
or mocking the symbiotic relationship of labour and pleasure. But when
the professional reversal of worker and star is mirrored by the growing
sexual attachment of the manager to his new performer, tragedy will
ensue. And in its climactic crime passionnel, Piccadilly rejoins what we
might consider the archetypal East End narrative of transgression and
punishment.
As well as appreciating it in hindsight, we may wonder how Piccadilly
came to offer such an unusually compact yet complex reflection on the
traditional East–West relationship. The answer must surely lie in its unu-
sual production credits. The original script was a first work for cinema by
the very successful novelist Arnold Bennett; and as the New York Times
critic dryly observed:
Mr. Bennett is not a screen writer and thus has retained in his story the
verisimilitude which would be necessary in a novel. The actions are all
motivated and swing freely forward without dismal hurdles or detours.
(July 15, 1929)
In fact, Bennett had already written in Close Up in 1927, lamenting that

cinema’s ‘new stories … are conventional, grossly sentimental, clumsy,
and fatally impaired by poverty of invention’ (Bennett 1927, 27–32).
244 I. Christie
Despite his advice that producers should not ‘go to established and
therefore middle-aged masters of literary narration’, who would not
understand the new medium, he apparently accepted the invitation from
BIP.
If Bennett brought a novelist’s understanding of the London social
matrix to his first and only screenplay, the German key production per-
sonnel may be assumed to have brought an awareness of ‘big city’ cin-
ematic conventions, which had been developed in German cinema
through a series of city films of the 1920s.4 This experience, however,
seems likely to have been tempered by observation, at least as far as the
East End is concerned. The film’s art director, Alfred Junge, would
remain in Britain after his initial three films with Dupont, becoming a
mainstay of the British school of production design, later famous for his
work with Hitchcock and with Powell and Pressburger. And despite the
absence of contextual evidence, it is hard not to believe that Junge, and
potentially the cinematographer Werner Brandes and director Ewald
Dupont, must have visited the ‘real’ East End as a prelude to creating
their much-admired version at Borehamwood studio (Robinson 2013,
65–73).
If Piccadilly established a dynamic link between East and West, then
later films would continue to draw upon this relationship. One impor-
tant case in the mid-1930s is the adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret
Agent, which became Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936). Here, the cen-
tral figure is an anarchist living under cover in London. In Conrad’s novel,
he runs a disreputable bookshop, which in the film becomes a small cin-
ema, located in south-east London. Unbeknownst to his American-born
wife and her son, Verloc has been charged with placing a bomb in central
London. It is primed to explode at the symbolic heart of London’s West
End, in a left-luggage office in Piccadilly Circus Underground station.
But under police surveillance, he cannot take it to the intended target, so
his stepson is assigned to carry it, along with a can of film intended for
another cinema, which leads him into the crowds gathered to watch the
Lord Mayor’s show.
Here, a plan hatched in the obscurity of East London will have explo-
sive repercussions for what Charlotte Brunsdon has termed ‘landmark
London’ (Brunsdon 2007, 21). We travel with the unwitting agent of
outrage (and self-destruction), as he makes his way into the heart of an
event that symbolises what another writer, Andrew Higson, has called
‘monumental’, or traditional London (Higson 2011, 81–83).5 And to
further compound the irony, the image used as backdrop for Stevie’s
journey is in fact the procession’s westernmost limit, the Royal Courts

of Justice on the Strand. As in Piccadilly, the condensed juxtaposition of
marginal and monumental London evokes a history, in this case of East
London harbouring refugees, who were also sometimes political radicals,
and at various times perceived as a threat to the British state.
Ten years later, the relationship between East and West would be seen
from a specifically East London perspective, as part of Ealing Studios’
commitment to making films with an identifiable sense of place. Many
of these were set in London, famously using the names of areas in their
titles, as with Passport to Pimlico (1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951)
and Pool of London (1951), while others made use of extensive loca-
tion shooting in areas not previously shown on screen, for example the
blitzed Southbank in Hue and Cry (1947), Paddington and Maida Vale
in The Blue Lamp (1950).
One such Ealing production, It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), was
set within the East London districts of Bethnal Green and Stratford.
Making considerable use of ‘real’ streets and railway architecture (although
not those of Bethnal Green, but actually in Camden Town), the film is sig-
nificant for capturing a traditional way of life on the cusp of change. One
group of its characters is a Jewish family, whose most ambitious member,
Lou, advises his sister to ‘move out of East London’, suggesting Stamford
Hill as a more upwardly mobile district. But the central character, Rose,
seems to be rooted in Bethnal Green, despite her aspiration to be else-
where. The unexpected appearance of her former lover, a violent crimi-
nal, Tommy, who has escaped from prison and is seeking refuge with her,
prompts a flashback memory of their first meeting. She is working as a pub
barmaid; when he enters there is immediate mutual attraction. Why don’t
they, he suggests, ‘do nothing one day … go up west’.
Rose and Tommy are indeed together in the following scene, but
against the background of a seaside bay rather than the West End. They
have shared a day together, leading Rose to complain, ‘I wish there
was no such place as Bethnal Green’. But even as she prepares to marry
Tommy, news comes that he has been caught and imprisoned, condemn-
ing her to the continued life of drudgery in the East End with a dull hus-
band and stepchildren that we have already seen. As Brunsdon observes:
‘“Going up West” is literally absent, but its pleasures and temptations are
evoked.’6 For many living in London’s outer and poorer districts, ‘going
up West’ has long represented the promise of distraction and excitement,
a temporary escape from the mundane. As recently as 2005, a participant
in a web-forum spelled this out:
246 I. Christie
I live in the East End of London. Up west is a daily East London expres-
sion which means going to town, going up London, getting on a tube or
a train and going to town. Up west specifically refers to beyond the City:
Oxford Street, Charing Cross Road, Tottenham Court Road, Covent
Garden would all be up West. (Cirrus 2005)
Losing Our Bearings

In the same year as It Always Rains, a short cinemagazine entitled Pathé
Pictorial Looks East–West invoked the traditional contrast between ‘the
smart and the shabby’, described in the commentary as ‘two worlds
under the same roof’, and relying on a repertoire of richly clichéd
images. Location-based films such as Jules Dassin’s Night and the City
(1950) and Carol Reed’s A Kid for Two Farthings (1955) would work
to expand this repertoire, while remaining within a familiar East–West
diegesis. And even during the explosion of location-based filmmaking
of the 1960s, these coordinates would remain reliable, albeit with an
extension of the traditional West End to include parts of Kensington and
Notting Hill as epicentres of ‘Swinging London’.
Since the 1980s, however, some of the most commercially successful
London-set films have sought to modernise the narrative of London, and
hence the vocabulary of recognisable locations. Examples would include
the Southwark of Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), the eponymous Notting
Hill (1999) and the Mayfair and Canary Wharf of Love Actually (2003).
But a number of films have also worked deliberately against any sense
of the familiar, seeking to disorient viewers, or to introduce them to an
‘unexpected London’ that is not oriented around the familiar East–West
axis. Stephen Frears has played an important part in this movement, first
with My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), set entirely in the South London of
Battersea and Lambeth, previously seen only in 1960s television drama,
such as Up the Junction (1965) and Cathy Come Home (1966). His later
Dirty Pretty Things (2002) went considerably further. Here, the aim of the
film’s makers was to present a ‘shadow’ city, as experienced by illegal immi-
grants. From the opening dialogue, in which a Nigerian doctor working as
a minicab driver offers a menu of touristic possibilities—‘you want a car?
Theatreland. London? Buckingham Palace?’—the film deliberately used
‘bits of London that hadn’t been in every other film’.7 Lighting, as well
as location, plays a crucial role. Many scenes are set in near darkness, or in
harsh neon light (see Fig. 1), emphasising the marginal and multiple lives
that its protagonists live as ‘the people you do not see’ (Hovet 2006).8
Fig. 1 ‘The people you do not see’: The shadowy lives of immigrants in
Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things (2002)
Clearly this accented or ‘dialect’ portrayal of London has owed much

to television drama since the 1960s, and to an awareness on the part of
filmmakers that London is experienced on many levels, depending on
the status, ethnicity and indeed legality of its inhabitants. In this idiom,
the television and cinema films of Mike Leigh deserve detailed discus-
sion, mapping as they do the trajectories of marginal and often isolated
characters, who are all located in a precise topography of the modern
city. For Leigh, as an inveterate improviser, the location of characters and
relationships is crucial, as he made clear in an unusual guided tour of
London sites used over thirty-seven years, done for the listings magazine
Time Out in 2008 (Calhoun 2008).
Another vital new factor has been the emergence of filmmakers who
can draw upon their own experience of the city as experienced by eth-
nic minorities. A pioneering film based on the experience of Afro-
Caribbean youth was Horace Ové’s Pressure (1976), co-written with
another Trinidadian, Samuel Selvon, who had published a ground-
breaking novel, The Lonely Londoners (1956), about the experience of
the Caribbean ‘Windrush’ generation.9 As the first ‘black British’ fea-
ture, Pressure carried a burden of expectation, and had difficulty securing
screenings in the mid-1970s. Only much later has it been recognised as a
unique portrayal of the West London black community around Harrow
248 I. Christie
Road and Ladbroke Grove during the period of Black Power’s notoriety
(UK Film Council 2009, 54–55).
Black British filmmaking has effectively remapped filmic London,
drawing attention to the established immigrant communities of West
Kensington and Brixton—communities that were conspicuously absent
from the street-life shown in Notting Hill (Reeves 2008, 82).10 This
revision of the traditional topography has continued in the work of Noel
Clarke, as a writer and director drawing on his own experience of West
London. In Kidulthood (2006) he explored the landscape of young
West Londoners, living around Ladbroke Grove, whose idea of adven-
ture is, like earlier generations of East Londoners, to ‘go West End’.11
But this is not the ‘old’ West End of cinemas and clubs, centred on
Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square (as seen in Claude Goretta and
Alain Tanner’s classic 1957 documentary Nice Time). For the multi-eth-
nic Kidulthood generation, mostly living in high-rise council housing, it
is Oxford Street’s mass-market fashion stores and side streets that offer a
tantalising playground. Clarke has spoken about the importance of spe-
cific locations for the teenage subculture portrayed in Kidulthood:
I want this shot outside the Ladbroke Grove tube station, I want to shoot
it on the Hammersmith and city line, I want to shoot it at Royal Oak, I
want to shoot Oxford Street. These are the places I have to shoot this film
as it actually really brings you the look of the film. (Quoted in Barry 2016)
Alongside Kidulthood and its sequels, Adulthood (2008) and Brotherhood

(2016), there have been other sporadic attempts to portray Black
London experience, from the North Kensington of Menelik Shabazz’s
Burning an Illusion (1981) to Bullet Boy (2004), set in Hackney and
dealing with the glamour of gun culture, co-written by the black novelist
Catherine Johnson. Likewise, Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham
(2002), set among the Indian communities of North London, seemed to
promise a belated recognition of British Asian experience. But all of these
have proved isolated successes, leaving large tracts of immigrant and eth-
nic minority experience effectively invisible on screen.
This chapter has aimed to demonstrate that where films take us is at
least as important as the patterns of narrative and characterisation which
have traditionally been considered more significant. Not that the city
can simply be read from its screen images. ‘Places’ created on screen are
rarely locations shown in their natural state. And even if real locations,
selectively framed, provide an exterior sense of place, the interiors that

characters inhabit are invariably constructed, often in a studio or in
quite different locations. ‘Place’, although an essential aspect of how
film engages us, draws us into its world, is not reducible to the literal
landscape. Where we believe we are ‘in’ a film depends as much on what
we are told, on how the relevant signs have been assembled, as on any
authentic traces of the off-screen world.
We can assume that the makers of films ‘set’ in London are conscious
of engaging with at least some part of the massive historical and cul-
tural complex that has accumulated through its history. Often their task
is to carve out and isolate which aspect is being foregrounded. And, of
course, we, as reflective viewers, must beware of becoming fixated on a
static sense of ‘place’ (a tendency fed by the numerous ‘location guides’
now available in print and online). Odin writes of ‘entering a world’
as we watch a film, and of ‘resonating’ with the events portrayed. The
films set in London discussed here are mostly peopled with characters
who belong to one of London’s sub-worlds, but who may aspire to reach
another, even if this is not always in the opposite direction. For much of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, East and West represented the
extremes of an economic and social scale, from poor to affluent, which
established the basic patterns of London-based fiction. But this pat-
tern has changed profoundly since the 1960s, with successive waves of
‘slum clearance’ and gentrification creating a more complex social map
of London—one that was anatomised in a survey carried out in 2014
which invited Londoners to characterise their perception of the city’s
four quadrants (Blundy 2014).
Undoubtedly, this has set new challenges for the makers of London
fiction, no longer able to rely on the stability of East and West stereo-
types. While BBC television has succeeded in creating a synthetic com-
posite of the old and the new East End in its soap opera EastEnders, the
author of a single fiction film is obliged to create a ‘world’ afresh from
elements of the reality shared with its intended viewers (Yacavone 2015).
The experience of such viewers has perhaps changed even more radi-
cally than the city itself, both in terms of how they navigate it and screen
images of it, as possessors of ever-ready cameraphones. In 2007, Odin
regarded the camcorder as a ‘go-between’, a ‘catalyst without which the
city cannot be seen’. His point was that the framing of the image had
already become an essential feature of how we ‘see’ the world around
us. In a later essay, on the significance of the cameraphone, he speculates
250 I. Christie
about the significance of our near-universal ‘competence in the language

of cinema’ as users of cameraphones (Odin 2012: 155–169). This, he
argues, ‘has given film language real interactivity’, far beyond anything
imagined by the prophets of film as a form of writing (such as Alexandre
Astruc), or the amateur filmmakers of the twentieth century.
If I have the means to access any of the films mentioned in this chap-
ter, to compare their portrayal of a part of London with its ‘reality’,
potentially in situ thanks to a download or streaming, or even to inspect
remotely how that reality looks today (through Google Earth or a live
webcam), what are the implications for the inventory of past images of
London’s East and West End? Essentially, that they are past, historical,
although I am also free to add to them, through my own retrospective
‘making of’. I find myself in a position of connoisseurship, of knowing
much more than the films’ characters and indeed makers; of being able
to see how they fit into an evolving matrix. ‘London films’, we might say,
have become a kind of metanarrative of the city, as much, if not more so,
than ‘London writing’. And with a growing number of public as well as
private screens surrounding city-dwellers, we are no longer De Certeau’s
‘pedestrian enunciators’, but mobile archivists and producers. The ‘cine-
fication’ once imagined by visionary artists of the 1920s has become our
everyday reality. Regaining our bearings in this new screen world may be
the hardest project to define and pursue.
Notes
1. The film being silent allows us to imagine the invective of this exchange.
Had it been a talkie, the choice of language would have been unavoidably
constrained.
2. Another case of a long-forgotten British silent film receiving highly appre-
ciative attention in the modern era is Maurice Elvey’s Hindle Wakes
(1927). Here too, the film’s treatment of its heroine and her sexual inde-
pendence has surprised modern audiences, unaware of its source in an
Ibsenite play dating from 1910.
3. The original of Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera, John Gay’s Beggar’s
Opera (1728), was first mooted by Jonathan Swift as ‘a Newgate Pastoral
among the thieves and whores there’. Newgate Prison stood at the corner
of Newgate Street and Old Bailey just inside the City of London, and was
in use from the twelfth to the early twentieth century. It thus predates
the emergence of the East End in the nineteenth century as ‘synonymous
with poverty, overcrowding, disease and criminality’ (Palmer 1989).
4. The modern metropolis had become a major subject for German filmmak-
ers during the 1920s, in different genres, ranging from Murnau’s Der letzte
Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924), to Ruttmann’s Berlin, Sinfonie der grosstadt
(Berlin, Symphony of a Great City, 1926) and Lang’s Metropolis (1927).
5. Higson (2011) distinguishes three versions of Englishness: ‘traditional
heritage England’, ‘mundane urban modernity’ and ‘monumental metro-
politan modernity’, the last applying only to London.
6. On a different aspect of ‘going up West’ relating to Jewish communi-
ties in London, see ‘Living Up West’ on the UK Government Web
Archive: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/, http://www.
movinghere.org.uk/stories/story359/story359.htm?identifier=stories/
story359/story359.htm&ProjectNo=23.
7. Stephen Frears, audio commentary to Dirty Pretty Things DVD.
8. A line of dialogue quoted by Hovet (2006) from the scene in a parking
garage, where a human organ intended for transplanting is being delivered.
9. The Lonely Londoners was published in the same period as Colin
MacInnes’s better-known London Trilogy, also dealing with immigrant
life in the metropolis. See also Schwartz (2014).
10. Tony Reeves (2008) comments on the ‘whitewashing’ of Notting Hill:
‘The strangest thing about Notting Hill the movie is its total lack of eth-
nic diversity. Since the fifties the area has been defined by its large and
vibrant Afro-Caribbean community’.
11. An IMDb Messageboard posting on Kidulthood from 2008, responding
to a nervous message from abroad about London schools, reads: ‘This is
an AREA of London if you move to certain areas in North-West, East, or
South London, this can be what happens. Go to school in a posher area
and you’ll probably be alright. I don’t care who says I’m wrong, the rea-
son this movie is so popular is because it is REALITY for a lot of people
in London.’
References
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Excited for Brotherhood. Accessed 7 Apr 2017. http://www.konbini.com/
en/entertainment-2/kidulthood-doc-brotherhood/.
Bennett, Arnold. 1927. The Film ‘Story’. Close Up, December: 27–32.
Blundy, Rachel. 2014. East Is Poor, West Is Posh, South Is Rough and North
Is Intellectual. Evening Standard, January 27. Accessed 7 Apr 2017. http://
www.standard.co.uk/news/london/east-is-poor-west-is-posh-south-is-rough-
and-north-is-intellectual-londoners-views-on-the-citys-9088834.html.
252 I. Christie
Calhoun, Dave. 2008. Mike Leigh’s London Locations. Time Out. Accessed 7 Apr
2017. http://www.timeout.com/london/film/mike-leighs-london-locations-1.
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Index
A Big Fella (1937), 88

Aardman, 164 Bigger Picture, The (2013), 185
Adulthood (2008), 248 Bigger Splash, A (1973), 125
Adventures of Robin Hood, The (1938), Bill Sikes Up-to-Date (1907), 20
57 Blackmail (1929), 52
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Blaze On (1978), 179
(1939), 57 Blind Man’s Bluff (1907), 20
Albion (2014), 185 Blow-Up (1966), 195
Alfie (1966), 115 Blue Lamp, The (1950), 245
Aliens’ Invasion, The (1905), 88 Breaking and Entering (2006), 141
All or Nothing (2002), 134 Bricklayer and His Mate, The (1899),
Anthems (1997), 182, 183 19
Antonioni, Michaelangelo, 195 Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), 246
Arrest of a Deserter, The (1902), 18 Broken (2012), 136
As If and What? (2009), 187 Broken Blossoms (1919), 241
Away Days (2016), 188 Brotherhood (2016), 248
Bugsy Malone (1976), 28
Bullet Boy (2004), 248
B Burning an Illusion (1981), 248
Back to the Future (1985), 177 Buy Your Own Cherries (1904), 20
Beautiful People (1999), 141
Bells Go Down, The (1943), 5
Bend It Like Beckham (2002), 8, 248 C
Berlin, Sinfonie der grosstadt (1926), Cammell, Donald, 195
251 Career Girls (1997), 196
Better Than Life (2008), 184 Cavalcanti, Alberto, 148
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 253

P. Hirsch and C. O'Rourke (eds.), London on Film, Screening Spaces,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64979-5
254 Index
Chadha, Gurinder, 248 F

Chlorine (2003), 177 Fakir and the Footpads, The (1907), 22
Chromophobia (2005), 141 Fatal Hand, The (1907), 20, 21
City of Rats (2012), 188 Fat: Facts About Skateboarding, The
Clarke, Noel, 248 (2001), 187
Clockwork Orange, A (1971), 195 Fiennes, Martha, 141
Concrete California, A (n.d.), 187 Fires Were Started (1944), 76
Confirm or Deny (1941), 58 First Days, The (1940), 82
Cornelius, Henry, 196 Flame in the Streets (1961), 79
Creevy, Eran, 134 Fletcher-Cook, Graham, 182, 191
Flushed Away (2006), 10, 172
Footpads (1896), 17
D Ford, Jim, 187
101 Dalmatians (1961), 7 Ford, John, 59
Darling (1965), 7, 104, 110 Foreign Correspondent (1940), 58
Dassin, Jules, 246 Format Perspective (2012), 186
David Copperfield (1934), 57 Four in the Morning (1965), 104, 114
Days Like These (2015), 187 Frears, Stephen, 195, 246, 247, 251
Dearden, Basil, 119 Fully Flared (2007), 189
Death Squad, the Movie (1998), 184
Deep End (1970), 195
Devil’s Toy, The (1966), 178 G
Diary for Timothy, A (1946), 74, 81 Gayer, Richard, 179
Dirty Pretty Things (2002), 10, 246, Gilliat, Sidney, 196
247 Gleaming the Cube (1989), 177
Disney, Walt, 164, 168 Gnar Gnar (2007), 189
Dizdar, Jasmin, 141 Goodbye Mr Chips (1939), 58
Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001), 177 Grease (1978), 179
Down Terrace (2009), 137 Great Gatsby, The (2013), 28
DreamWorks, 164 Great Mouse Detective, The (1986),
Dupont, E.A., 32 164
Gretna Green Wedding, A (1899), 19
Grierson, John, 74, 149
E Griffith, D.W., 241
Eady, David, 94 Guide to Cracks & Curbs:
Edwards-Wood, Henry, 188 London, A (2015), 186
Elephant Boy, The (1937), 91 Gunga Din (1939), 91
Eleventh Hour (2013), 185
Evans, Philip, 186
Exhibition (2013), 141, 144 H
Extraordinary Cab Accident, An Hall, Alexander, 242
(1903), 20 Hangover Square (1945), 58
Index 255
Heart Within, The (1957), 88, 94, L

96, 97 Lady Vanishes, The (1938), 44, 45
Heel Toe Magic (2009), 184 Lavender Hill Mob, The (1951), 245
Helenka, Lucia, 187 Lean, David, 196
High Hopes (1988), 9, 134 Leigh, Mike, 1, 9, 134, 196, 247
High-Rise (2015), 9, 139 Leni, Paul, 241
Hitchcock, Alfred, 46, 61, 244 Life Is Sweet (1990), 196
Hockney, David, 125 Limehouse Blues (1934), 242
Hogg, Joanna, 141 Listen to Britain (1942), 6, 74
Hot Fuzz (2007), 193 Little Bit of Cloth, A (1907), 20
Hot Wheels ‘n’ Big Deals (1978), 179 Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936), 58
How Green Was My Valley (1941), 60 Lively Dispute, A (1898), 19
Hue and Cry (1947), 245 Lloyd, Mat, 186
Lloyds of London (1937), 57
Lodger, The (1926), 241
I Lodger, The (1944), 58
In Motion (2003), 184 London (1994), 11, 73, 147, 151,
It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), 154, 157
69, 245 London Can Take It! (1940), 11, 74,
It’s Love Again (1936), 39 78, 80
London Night Skate (2014), 186
London Nobody Knows, The (1969),
J 158
Jennings, Humphrey, 75, 149 London with Nick Jensen (2013), 186
Jetée, La (1962), 149 Long Good Friday, The (1979), 140
Journey for Margaret (1942), 58 Lords of Dogtown (2005), 177
Jungle Book, The (1942), 91 Lost and Found (2005), 184
Love Actually (2003), 246
Lovenskate Video, The (2012), 185
K
Kapadia, Asif, 1
Keiller, Patrick, 11, 73, 147 M
Kellner, Tim, 186 Mackenzie, John, 140
Kelly, Paul, 221, 229, 234 Magic Rolling Board (1976), 179
Kid, The (1920), 95 Maisie’s Marriage (1923), 29
Kid for Two Farthings, A (1955), 246 Make Friends with the Colour Blue
Kidulthood (2006), 8, 248 (2010), 184
Killing of Sister George, The (1968), 9, Man Who Knew Too Much, The
117, 119, 122, 123 (1934), 44
Kill List (2011), 137 Marker, Chris, 149
King Solomon’s Mines (1937), 91 Mary Poppins (1964), 69
Kubrick, Stanley, 195 Max & Dania, 1
256 Index
Medium Exposed, The (1906), 20, 21, 24 Piccadilly (1929), 8, 29, 33

Minghella, Anthony, 141 Playing Fields (1997), 182
Mona Lisa (1986), 209 Pleasure Garden, The (1925), 29, 35, 36
Motorist, The ‘?’ (1906), 20, 23, 24 Pool of London (1951), 245
Mr. Pecksniff Fetches the Doctor (1904), Pressure (1976), 8, 247
20 Pretty Sweet (2012), 189
Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), 57 Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex,
My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), 195, The (1939), 57
209, 246 Propeller (2015), 189
My Fair Lady (1964), 69 Proud Valley, The (1940), 89
N Q
Naked (1993), 196 Quatermass and the Pit (1967), 229
Never Been Loved (2005), 184
Night and the City (1950), 246
Nighthawks (1978), 9, 117, 125, 127 R
Night Must Fall (1937), 58 Raban, William, 148
None But the Lonely Heart (1944), 7, Ramsey, Lynne, 1
58 Reed, Carol, 246
Noose (1948), 69 Refuge England (1959), 224
Norris, Rufus, 136 Richardson, Emily, 229
Norwood (1983), 153 Riefenstahl, Leni, 1
Notting Hill (1999), 246 Robinson, Bruce, 195
Roeg, Nicholas, 195
Rollin’ through the Decades (2005),
O 182
Odets, Clifford, 59, 61, 65, 69 Rom Boys: 40 Years of Rad (2018), 187
Odyssey, The (2012), 1 Rugged Raw (2014), 185
O’Hanlan, Jim, 141 Running Jump, A (2012), 1
Ollie the Gap (1988), 182 Ruttmann, Walter, 148
Ordinary People (1941), 77
Out of Chaos (1944), 74, 82
Ové, Horace, 247 S
Sabotage (1936), 6, 43, 244
Sanders of the River (1935), 89
P Sapphire (1959), 8, 120
Pandora’s Box (1929), 241 Save South Bank (2008), 185
Passenger (2004), 186 Secret Agent (1936), 44
Passport to Pimlico (1949), 11, 245 Secrets and Lies (1996), 196
Paul, Robert W., 15, 24 Selby, Jenna, 187
Peck, Ron, 125 Seven Summers (2012), 11, 230, 234
Performance (1970), 195 Shabazz, Menelik, 248
Index 257
Shaun of the Dead (2004), 8, 193, 198 Twenty-Fourteen (2014), 190

Shifty (2008), 134
Show Boat (1936), 88
Sightseers (2012), 137 U
Simmons, Anthony, 104, 106 Ultimate Flex Machine (1975), 179
Skateboard Madness (1979), 179 Undercroft, The (2015), 185
Skate London (2014), 185 Unfortunate Policeman, The (1905),
Skaterdater (1965), 178 21, 22
Skate World: England (2013), 185 Up the River (1896), 19
Skolimoski, Jerzy, 195
Skyfall (2012), 5, 206, 215
Soldier’s Courtship, The (1896), 17 V
Some Like It Hot (1959), 28 Vanishing Street, The (1961), 8, 221,
Song of Freedom (1936), 8, 89, 90 224, 226, 228
So What? (2016), 190 Vas, Robert, 221, 224
Sparrows Can’t Sing (1962), 229 Vase (2015), 185
Spectre (2015), 5, 206 Vera Drake (2004), 136
Spinn’in Wheels (1975), 179 Victim (1961), 7, 117, 119, 121, 229
Spirit of the Blitz (1991), 182 Victim of Misfortune, A (1905), 20
Square One (2009), 184–185 Video Nasty (2013), 185
39 Steps, The (1935), 44, 53
Stevedore (1935), 88
Stonebridge Park (1981), 153 W
100 Streets (2016), 141 War and Order (1940), 77
Waterloo Road (1945), 68
Waxworks (1924), 241
T Wayfarer Compelled Partially to
Taste of Honey, A (1961), 119 Disrobe, A (1897), 19
Thames Film (1986), 148 What Have You Done Today, Mervyn
They Made Me a Fugitive (1947), 69 Day? (2005), 221
This Above All (1942), 58 What If (2012), 1
This Happy Breed (1944), 196 Withnail and I (1987), 195
This Time Tomorrow (2013), 189 World’s End, The (2013), 193
Thrasher Vacation (2014), 189 Wrecker, The (1929), 29, 37
Thrilling Fight on a Scaffold (1899),
19
Tommy Atkins in the Park (1898), 19 Y
Tonight and Every Night (1945), 58 Yank in the RAF, A (1941), 58
Tower Block (2011), 140 You Can’t Move History (2015), 185
Toy Story trilogy, 173
Transit (2006), 229
Trouble Brewing (1939), 39
True (2014), 189

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LO N D O N

More information about this series at

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017949476

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover image: © mattscutt/Alamy

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

Introduction: Film Londons 1

‘Local Film Subjects’: Suburban Cinema, 1895–1910 15

Glamour and Crime: The London Nightclub in Silent Film 27

Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936): Conspirators and Bombs

‘A Relic of the Bad Old Days’: Hollywood’s London

London Can Take It: Documentary Reconstructions

From the Docks to Notting Hill: Cinematic Mappings

Wanting More: Gender, Space and Desire in Darling

Queer London on Film: Victim (1961), The Killing of Sister

Housing Policy and Building Types: From High Hopes to

A Melancholy Topography: Patrick Keiller’s London 147

From Dogpower to Ratropolis: London in Animated Film 163

Skateboard City: London in Skateboarding Films 177

Shaun of the Dead and the Construction of Cult Space in

The Cinematic Revival of ‘Low London’ in the Age

London in Transition: Sites of Melancholy 221

East–West: Reflections on the Changing Cinematic

About the Editors

Pam Hirsch has recently retired as Lecturer in Literature and Film

Chris O’Rourke is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television History at

David Anderson is a Ph.D. researcher and Teaching Assistant in the

Paul Newland is Reader in Film Studies at Aberystwyth University.

‘Local Film Subjects’: Suburban Cinema, 1895–1910

London Can Take It: Documentary Reconstructions of the City

Skateboard City: London in Skateboarding Films

Pam Hirsch and Chris O’Rourke

Alongside the official proceedings at the London 2012 Olympics, the

© The Author(s) 2017 1

a modernist housing estate in the north-London borough of Camden

disciplines’ (Brunsdon 2012, 227). By focusing on a single location, the

this, Brunsdon chose to structure her 2007 book spatially, focussing on

Building—a view steeped in nationalist and imperial history. Comparable

audiences to appreciate, although its depiction of the East End now

unremarkable suburban street into a place of fan pilgrimage. Newland’s

A plaque affixed in 1996 to an ordinary house on Park Road in Chipping

© The Author(s) 2017 15

also as producers of images of their suburban environs. They were, in all

description: ‘Piccadilly Circus’, ‘Westminster’, ‘Outside the Paragon’,

The resulting setting for The Soldier’s Courtship (1896), depict-

a background depicting a clearly recognisable Ludgate Circus. This film

In this same advertisement Paul gives some sample titles—‘The Servant

of the “social” realism that would later be so influential internationally,

near the studio: An Extraordinary Cab Accident (1903), Mr. Pecksniff

around the Freehold developed as a lower-class district, its inhabitants

a real house on a real street before arriving at the studio-made exterior of

The proximity of the rural to the suburban is fully thematised in The

———. 1996c. The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, 1894–1901, vol. 3.

When we entered, three tired waiters were leaning against an aggressive

© The Author(s) 2017 27

collective memory through American literature such as Fitzgerald’s, as

The Public–Private Nightclub

The Development of the London Nightclub

a high-profile campaign, which included stricter legislation and an expan-

The British Nightclub in Silent Film

Fig. 1 The façade of the Piccadilly Club in Piccadilly (1929)

as a white, middle-class space purely for entertainment and leisure where

The Development of the London Nightclub

The British Nightclub in Silent Film

Fig. 1 The façade of the Piccadilly Club in Piccadilly (1929)

Fig. 1 Blown up by his own bomb (Illustrated Police Budget, February

Hitchcock in the 1930s

Fig. 2 Roast beef at Simpson’s, in Sabotage (1936) (image courtesy of Kobak/

Fig. 3 Stevie, already a victim, in Sabotage (1936) (image courtesy of Rex/

Fig. 3 Signs of containment in A Diary for Timothy (1946)

Paul Robeson and the Empire Film

Fig. 1 A unifying figure. Paul Robeson in Song of Freedom (1936)

‘Keeping the Empire at Bay’: Earl Cameron and the Social

Fig. 2 A misunderstood outsider. Earl Cameron in The Heart Within (1957)

The Notting Hill Riots and a Change of Paradigm

Darling, the Swinging Subject, and the City

Fig. 1 Diana racing around Trafalgar Square in Darling (1965)

Stasis and Movement in Four in the Morning

Fig. 2 A joyride up the Thames in Four in the Morning (1965)