Seven Streets, Two Markets and a Wedding: Glimpses of Lost London 1930-1980

Ladies, you’d best take care on the roads. You wouldn’t want to get run over. Him indoors will grumble if your leg is in plaster and his dinner isn’t on the table. That’s the quaint message of a 1932 road safety film in this collection of archive short films of London life, many of them unseen for generations.

There’s footage of a pristine Hackney estate, the bricks still gleaming; another of majorettes pleased as punch in their uniforms at a carnival in Victoria Park in 1979; another shot on Lambeth Walk in 1962 (takehome: a teenager with a strop-on and too much eye-makeup looks the same in any decade). The films are an intriguing mix of home movies, early wedding videos and public service broadcasts. In places they gave me an eerie feeling of watching a forgotten memory or dream.