Nine short documentaries about London
That deserve to be better known
Hello and welcome to Wooden City, a newsletter about London.
If you haven’t come here via @caffs_not_cafes, I'm a writer called Isaac Rangaswami and this is my Substack.
Most weeks I write about things like shops, pubs and restaurants, but today’s issue is a documentary special.
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I saw Mike Leigh’s 1993 film, Naked, for the first time recently. I found it equal parts compelling and excruciating: as with its monstrous main character, the London it depicts is cruel and miserable, a city of dark alleys, underpasses and stock brick houses where violence takes place. The exterior of Lina Stores also makes an appearance, and I now see its venerable pistachio tiling in a different light.
Naked is a film about psychopaths and exposed people who have slipped through the city’s cracks. I like it for those reasons, but also because it says something interesting about London. While I have nothing against Notting Hill and Paddington, it’s harder to say the same about them.
After seeing Naked, I tried to seek out other dramas in which London is more than a backdrop. Plenty exist, but the more of them I watched, the more I wanted to cut out the middleman to focus on films in which London is explicitly the theme. That basically means documentaries, so I made a list of nine that I wanted to watch or rewatch, then spent my spare moments doing just that.
Now that I’ve thought harder about what those documentaries share, it’s obvious that I’ve been drawn to films with similar preoccupations. They are all about Londoners, and the forces that shape where they work and live. They show that London has always been ever-changing, whether through decay, destruction or the process of being rebuilt.
Aside from one, these documentaries are all under an hour long, because that made it easier to watch more of them. You can stream each of them for free, except a single film that costs £1 to rent. I got a lot out of writing and researching this, so I’ll definitely do some follow-up pieces. If you have any London film recommendations, documentary or otherwise, do let me know.
Streetwise (1996)
Mark Phillips’s Streetwise is a documentary about education through intimidation, which follows prospective cab drivers memorising every street in London and recalling that knowledge in front of stern, prejudiced ex-policemen. This is one of my favourite documentaries, filmed when the Metropolitan Police was responsible for assessing drivers, and I return to it often.
The main subject is a rehabilitated burglar called Jim Nolan, who has been programming the city into his brain for years. Nolan performs well during his “appearances”, where an examiner asks a student to describe the route between two random locations, but he fails to progress. It’s tempting to think that he’s held back because of his background, especially when the starting point his examiner chooses is the Penal Reform Society.