The London Nobody Knows (review)

Adapted from architectural historian and draftsman Geoffrey Fletcher's book of the same name (published 1962), The London Nobody Knows is a quirky, personable documentary concerned with finding the lingering elements of the Victorian and Edwardian eras in mid-1960s London. As narrated by actor James Mason, the film isolates curious locations on the brink of disappearance, extinction, or obsolescence.

Fletcher's book is organized by area, but the film chooses to order its selections in more thematic ways. The film begins at a construction site, and soon displays a very idiosyncratic style, showing ultra-modern office towers cut to the rhythm of playful music. The tone abruptly changes—a tactic used at several key points in the film—and cameras enter the inside of the decrepit Bedford Theatre, once a famed venue from the halcyon days of music hall performance, now reduced to putrefying ruin with a hole in the roof. These sequences establish The London Nobody Knows' governing dialectic of rot and rebirth.

Mason exudes the perfect demeanor for so strange a project. Part bemused gentleman, part flâneur, and part engaged social reformer, he heads this tour (via on-camera narration and voice-over) around some of the most unsightly spots in the city. Focus tends toward architectural remnants and dead technologies, but the living, human significances remain key. For example, after introducing a 19th century railroad Roundhouse (used for maintenance and track changes), Mason walks amongst the thoroughly rusted grounds surrounding the place. Director Norman Cohen's camera isolates discarded bolts, nails, and decaying wooden barriers. Lest we grow too attached to these oddities, Mason opines "We'd be foolish to mourn them too readily." This phrase—and others like it—keep the film from being too laudatory, too unrealistically critical of the encroaching sights and services of the late 1960s.

With the exception of an almost slapstick send-up to the emergence of the mini-skirt, topics too readily associated with London's swinging side (indeed, in full "swing" during the film's production) are absent, and focus is on the unlucky, the forgotten. Britain's cultural ascendancy and hip image are contrasted against its underbelly, a rag-pickers economy of markets (Chapel Market in Islington, the trash heaps of Spitalfields in the East End), homes for the down-and out (a strangely impersonal Salvation Army mission) and the insane (the film's final image is of an apocalyptic street preacher suggesting the end of days). Some of the squalor is truly eye-opening, such as the footage of meths (methylated spirits) drinkers fighting. Their rage and desperation appears to be frighteningly real.

While much of the film is candid, there are very carefully staged sequences. In showing a public lavatory in Holborn dated to 1897, Mason points to the goldfishes reported to have been kept in the water-refill tank by the attendant. He notes that the crew brought their own today to enhance ambiance. Other portions reflect strange, arty flights of fancy, such as when Mason notices an "Egg-Breaking" plant near Southwark. What follows is a strange, silent interlude (Richard Lester meets Dada meets The Goon Show) in which two men in lab coats test the structural strength of white eggs by breaking them in creative ways, from hammer to karate chop to steam roller. The resulting image of piled shells provides a segue to footage of trash collectors adding eggs and other refuse to their removal van.

This playful, associative logic showcases the film's unique qualities and continued relevance to students of British society of the 1960s, architectural and urban historians, and psychogeographers. In fact, the film—with its focus on the outcast, the dead, and the more obscure haunts of London's East End—is an obvious precursor to the London writing of Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, or the cinema of Patrick Keiller, whose own 1994 film London is strikingly similar at times. The London Nobody Knows is...