Capital Tales

This whistle-stop journey across 100 years of London on film takes us from top-hatted Victorians parading on Blackfriars Bridge to the Swinging Sixties and beyond. Capital Tales features over 25 rarely seen films and extracts from the BFI National Archive and London's Screen Archive network and live piano accompaniment from John Sweeney.

Among the highlights are Old London Street Scenes (1903), demonstrating traffic congestion of the horse-drawn kind in Edwardian London; there's an eerily prophetic vision of the future in The Fugitive Futurist (1924) as Trafalgar Square is flooded whilst Sunshine in Soho (1956) beats to the 'cosmopolitan' life and after-dark jazz bars at the heart of the capital.

Robin Baker