2009-11-12
post/241424078
video 12:28:28
The Living City, a 1970 promotional film from the City of London.
Highlights:
- middle managers running to distribute the changes in bank rates, at 7’
- at 8’30, the London Fur Auction (“turnover is between £30 and £40m”) and the PLA ivory warehouse (“a narwhal’s tusk used for the Bishop of Coventry’s staff”)
- two now-lost office schemes, at Tower Place and Paternoster Square, at 14’45.
- from 16’45, the Barbican, complete with a whole section on the highwalks, with the City “claiming to be pioneering total pedestrian traffic segregation in the world”
- Fleet Street, when it was still producing newspapers
- more demolished schemes- Fetter Lane, at 19’30; pieces in “a vast and highly complex jigsaw puzzle”
- ramjet engines at City University, at 25’
This is just one of the many (quite long) films that London’s Screen Archives have posted. I can sense a timesink looming.
