The London Nobody Knows

James Mason - Narrator

In the little-seen documentary The London Nobody Knows, narrator James Mason takes us on a walking-tour around the lesser-known corners of London. The film was directed by Norman Cohen and based on a book by historian Geoffrey Fletcher. It's a journey made all the more poignant and strange due to the fact that many of these landmarks, once simply obscure, have now disappeared completely.

The film opens with Mason walking around the ruins of the now-gone Bedford Theatre in Camden, where music-hall singer Marie Lloyd was a regular performer and which Walter Sickert frequently painted. Mason is quite unsentimental and laments much of the construction since Sir Christopher Wren. He visits Camden Freight Terminal and the part George Stephenson designed locomotive Roundhouse; the narrator notes the romance of steam but that “we’d be foolish to mourn them too readily.”

Next, Mason retreats to urban London and we are given a glance of a thriving street market in Church Street, Edgware Road, and we see one of the city’s final gas lamp-lighters going about his duty. The filming moves next to focus on London’s dying buskers, not the hundreds of contemporary singers with an acoustic guitar performing popular cover versions, but colourful street entertainer Lord Mustard. After a brief glimpse of Islington's Chapel Market and the nearby pie and mash shop, Mason visits a Salvation Army hostel and talks with the elderly residents; after which there is a brief glimpse of London’s genuine down-and-outs.

Spitalfields tenements is Mason’s next stop, particularly 29 Hanbury Street which was the site of Jack the Ripper’s second murder. But history is not always kind to the narrator as Mason looks on favourably at the then shiny new tower blocks; now often decrepit and crime-ridden.