With the help of the British Film Institute's Our Screen Heritage programme, I've made a short film remixing nearly a century of archive footage from movies, television, amateur film and video and the internet to tell the story of the British suburbs. Are they conformist or eccentric? Conservative or radical? Normal or surreal? Song of the Suburbs reveals they're all these things, and much more.
Among the things you'll see in this film are: extreme slum clearance (above), allotments, the foundation of the welfare state, poltergeists in suburban London, the North Korean embassy in a suburban semi, the rise of new towns, the fall of the high-rise flat, solstice rituals at Milton Keynes, house name plates, extremely dangerous children's games, a house shaped like a UFO, a child stroking a caterpillar, and a man who has redecorated his entire home in 1970s fashions.
The footage gathered includes TikToks and YouTube travelogues, silent documentaries made by anti-slum campaigners, films by Jill Craigie and Charlotte Regan, animation from Bob Godfrey and Derek Phillips, Super 8 home movies and student films, news reports from Nationwide, government information films and more, all to tell the story of a part of Britain too often mislabelled as boring.
Click on the News page to find out more information about screenings.