January. A new year, another new flat; this time it’s Limehouse, London Borough of Tower Hamlets. “So much history!” a friend exclaims, and I smile and nod as if it wasn’t the only half-decent place we could afford. London’s my hometown, but I hardly know this area. Wikipedia tells me that Ian McKellen owns the local pub. This is promising.
February. From our balcony, the skyline is framed by London’s two financial districts: the City to the west, Canary Wharf to the east. Between them runs the river, as if caught in a terrible tug of war. Tracing its curves on Google Maps, I find a blurred oasis at the end of my street: the walled garden of a former warehouse, converted some decades ago into the home of David Lean. I quickly learn to love the river.
March. Flicking channels on a hungover Sunday I land on The Limehouse Golem, a fairly typical period portrayal of the East End as a grubby canvas for murder, drugs, and prostitution. It was shot in Manchester and Leeds. London has changed all over, but the Docklands more so than most areas since the closure of the docks in the 1960s and ’70s. Limehouse no longer has any hope of playing its Victorian self.
April. The local station is shut, so I head towards Canary Wharf. I’m reminded why I rarely come here, despite the allure of rapid transport links across the city: the soulless concrete, overpriced coffee, zombies in suits. Tower Hamlets is one of the poorest boroughs in London, but it’s also home to some of the highest-paid people in the world. Canary Wharf was one of the main filming locations for Danny Boyle’s post-apocalyptic film 28 Days Later, and that’s exactly how it feels today.
May. A neighbour tells me that Limehouse was London’s old Chinatown, where Chinese sailors and their families had settled in the late 1800s. In the BFI archives online, I find the 1924 travelogue Cosmopolitan London, which gives a glimpse of the real Chinatown, as well as the nearby Lascar communities. Anthropological pretense is betrayed by the condescending, racist intertitles that identify Limehouse as “a wilderness of squalor.” How to feel about a film that no doubt contributed to the alarmist media coverage that would eventually hasten the destruction of these communities, but at the same time provides a precious visual trace of their existence?
June. I’m in Sheffield for the DocFest, where I catch a rare screening of works by the Sheffield Film Co-op. I’m particularly taken with Bringing It All Back Home, an astonishingly clear-headed picture of globalization in the late 1980s. The film spends some time arguing against the planned regeneration of the Docklands under Thatcher that was transforming the area into the banking district it is today—at the expense of the local community, already suffering since the closure of the docks. I’m reminded that things could've been different, still might be.
July. Searching for images of pre-war Limehouse, I end up watching D.W. Griffith’s 1919 silent film Broken Blossoms. It’s Chinatown cobbled together in a Hollywood studio, with all the usual clichés of the area as a den of depravity. Griffith finds it in him to depict his Chinese protagonist sympathetically, though he’s still played by the white actor Richard Barthelmess. On YouTube, I watch clips from the Fu Manchu serials, which proffer a more blatant Yellow Peril narrative—fear of migrant hordes, especially their corrupting influence on young white women. A quick Google search reveals that the Chinese population of Limehouse never exceeded around 300.
August. I’m away for another film festival, and again catch a glimpse of home in Lorenza Mazzetti's 1956 film Together. The post-war Docklands are given the neorealist treatment; piles of rubble where warehouses once stood, gangways running like arteries above the narrow riverside streets. Amidst the film’s focus on alienation and intolerance, glimpses of community can’t help but feel like a miracle.
September. My mum works as a health visitor in Tower Hamlets. She tells me about a recent visit to the family of a newborn living in a tiny, cramped flat. It was a sunny summer’s day, but the flat was dark. One of the new skyscrapers, towering over the apartment block, was obstructing the sun. I can’t bring myself to make some cutesy movie connection here. Sometimes this city disgusts me.
October. At a screening of films made by the Black Audio Film Collective, I see Reece Auguiste's Twilight City, a 1989 film that ties waves of urban destruction and redevelopment to London’s histories of racialised displacement. Some footage from Cosmopolitan London turns up as one backdrop for a daughter's poetic letter to her long-absent Dominican mother, imminently arriving back in London after years away. “My love is still here, like the water,” she writes. “That’s all that is left of our life on this estate. Why do you want to return to this?”
November. I’ve been working on a documentary project on Derek Jarman for months, but only now discover that Caravaggio was shot in a studio just minutes from my flat. One night I watch The Last of England, Jarman’s apocalyptic vision of Thatcherite Britain, set in the Docklands. The film takes its name from a painting by Ford Madox Brown depicting a husband and wife leaving England by boat for the last time; the white cliffs of Dover recede into the distance, they stare stonily ahead. I receive confirmation that we can renew the lease for another year, and that the rent, mercifully, is not going up.
December. It’s a miserable evening and I throw on Antonioni’s The Passenger to warm up. But before long I’m back in London, in Limehouse, in—wait, this scene was shot in one of the buildings opposite me. There’s Jenny Runacre and Steven Berkoff hanging out across the street, fifty years ago. London is like this. You can’t leave, not really.
January. A new year, another new flat; this time it’s Limehouse, London Borough of Tower Hamlets. “So much history!” a friend exclaims, and I smile and nod as if it wasn’t the only half-decent place we could afford. London’s my hometown, but I hardly know this area. Wikipedia tells me that Ian McKellen owns the local pub. This is promising.
February. From our balcony, the skyline is framed by London’s two financial districts: the City to the west, Canary Wharf to the east. Between them runs the river, as if caught in a terrible tug of war. Tracing its curves on Google Maps, I find a blurred oasis at the end of my street: the walled garden of a former warehouse, converted some decades ago into the home of David Lean. I quickly learn to love the river.
March. Flicking channels on a hungover Sunday I land on The Limehouse Golem, a fairly typical period portrayal of the East End as a grubby canvas for murder, drugs, and prostitution. It was shot in Manchester and Leeds. London has changed all over, but the Docklands more so than most areas since the closure of the docks in the 1960s and ’70s. Limehouse no longer has any hope of playing its Victorian self.
April. The local station is shut, so I head towards Canary Wharf. I’m reminded why I rarely come here, despite the allure of rapid transport links across the city: the soulless concrete, overpriced coffee, zombies in suits. Tower Hamlets is one of the poorest boroughs in London, but it’s also home to some of the highest-paid people in the world. Canary Wharf was one of the main filming locations for Danny Boyle’s post-apocalyptic film 28 Days Later, and that’s exactly how it feels today.
May. A neighbour tells me that Limehouse was London’s old Chinatown, where Chinese sailors and their families had settled in the late 1800s. In the BFI archives online, I find the 1924 travelogue Cosmopolitan London, which gives a glimpse of the real Chinatown, as well as the nearby Lascar communities. Anthropological pretense is betrayed by the condescending, racist intertitles that identify Limehouse as “a wilderness of squalor.” How to feel about a film that no doubt contributed to the alarmist media coverage that would eventually hasten the destruction of these communities, but at the same time provides a precious visual trace of their existence?
June. I’m in Sheffield for the DocFest, where I catch a rare screening of works by the Sheffield Film Co-op. I’m particularly taken with Bringing It All Back Home, an astonishingly clear-headed picture of globalization in the late 1980s. The film spends some time arguing against the planned regeneration of the Docklands under Thatcher that was transforming the area into the banking district it is today—at the expense of the local community, already suffering since the closure of the docks. I’m reminded that things could've been different, still might be.
July. Searching for images of pre-war Limehouse, I end up watching D.W. Griffith’s 1919 silent film Broken Blossoms. It’s Chinatown cobbled together in a Hollywood studio, with all the usual clichés of the area as a den of depravity. Griffith finds it in him to depict his Chinese protagonist sympathetically, though he’s still played by the white actor Richard Barthelmess. On YouTube, I watch clips from the Fu Manchu serials, which proffer a more blatant Yellow Peril narrative—fear of migrant hordes, especially their corrupting influence on young white women. A quick Google search reveals that the Chinese population of Limehouse never exceeded around 300.
August. I’m away for another film festival, and again catch a glimpse of home in Lorenza Mazzetti's 1956 film Together. The post-war Docklands are given the neorealist treatment; piles of rubble where warehouses once stood, gangways running like arteries above the narrow riverside streets. Amidst the film’s focus on alienation and intolerance, glimpses of community can’t help but feel like a miracle.
September. My mum works as a health visitor in Tower Hamlets. She tells me about a recent visit to the family of a newborn living in a tiny, cramped flat. It was a sunny summer’s day, but the flat was dark. One of the new skyscrapers, towering over the apartment block, was obstructing the sun. I can’t bring myself to make some cutesy movie connection here. Sometimes this city disgusts me.
October. At a screening of films made by the Black Audio Film Collective, I see Reece Auguiste's Twilight City, a 1989 film that ties waves of urban destruction and redevelopment to London’s histories of racialised displacement. Some footage from Cosmopolitan London turns up as one backdrop for a daughter's poetic letter to her long-absent Dominican mother, imminently arriving back in London after years away. “My love is still here, like the water,” she writes. “That’s all that is left of our life on this estate. Why do you want to return to this?”
November. I’ve been working on a documentary project on Derek Jarman for months, but only now discover that Caravaggio was shot in a studio just minutes from my flat. One night I watch The Last of England, Jarman’s apocalyptic vision of Thatcherite Britain, set in the Docklands. The film takes its name from a painting by Ford Madox Brown depicting a husband and wife leaving England by boat for the last time; the white cliffs of Dover recede into the distance, they stare stonily ahead. I receive confirmation that we can renew the lease for another year, and that the rent, mercifully, is not going up.
December. It’s a miserable evening and I throw on Antonioni’s The Passenger to warm up. But before long I’m back in London, in Limehouse, in—wait, this scene was shot in one of the buildings opposite me. There’s Jenny Runacre and Steven Berkoff hanging out across the street, fifty years ago. London is like this. You can’t leave, not really.