London in Transition: Sites of Melancholy

Abstract

This chapter reflects on the potent combination of melancholy and nostalgia that can be associated with the cinematic presentation of change in cities. Opening with a discussion of two versions of Lionel Bart’s song, ‘Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be’, the chapter argues against a generalised nostalgia for the vanished city. Instead it seeks to demonstrate the importance of attention to the particularity of what has been lost, its formal presentation and its contexts. This argument is developed through the analysis of filmic responses to the particular, planned development of two East London places at two different periods: Hessel Street (as part of mid-twentieth-century slum clearance) and the Lower Lea Valley (as preparation for the 2012 London Olympics). The discussion of two films, The Vanishing Street (1962) and What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day? (2005), which have as their topic these locations, explores the complicated meshing of time and place produced within each, and the different kinds of loss anticipated and explored. This study is concerned with the peculiar ability of film to offer its audiences images of what was once part of the material city and is now gone, and with both the tense and tone of these meditations. The ghostly cities preserved on film are always the product of particular circumstances, and should be attended to as such.