Wonderful London

Smoke - a London Peculiar and the BFI present... WONDERFUL LONDON FILM SCREENING LAUNCH at Rough Trade East this Wednesday 18th July at 7pm.


Henry B Parkinson and Frank Miller's breathtaking 1920s travelogues about our capital city. Travelling from Chelsea to Hackney and taking in the familiar landmarks of London town - Buckingham Palace, the River Thames, Big Ben, Tower Bridge and St Paul's Cathedral, Wonderful London also reveals the unknown nooks and crannies and parts of London rarely filmed; the poorer, over-populated districts of Clerkenwell and Whitechapel and the original Chinatown of Pennyfields in Limehouse. There are glimpses of buildings we can no longer see on the ground; the long-gone Crystal Palace and the recently vanished gates of White City, where London's first Olympic stadium now lies under the Westfield Shopping Centre; on a boat trip up the Thames we can see Fred Karno's legendary 'Karsino'. We can also take a trip through working-class London on a barge from Limehouse to Paddington Basin, via Camden and King's Cross. By bus or tram or foot, we can observe the thronging Sunday street markets and wander down the little alleyways, past the pubs and law courts - buildings that Dickens knew. And most poignantly, we can see a past generation of Londoners going about their business, complaining about the roadworks or looking with curiosity at us through the camera lens - all gone now - but strangely like the Londoners of today.

A Live soundtrack by Saint Etienne's Bob Stanley and Smoke: A London Peculiar editors Jude Rogers and Matt Haynes, plus BFI speaker Bryony Dixon.


Buy the dvd here. More info here.