Cosmopolitan London

1924 | 2 mins (extract)

It now sounds extremely old-fashioned, but before 'multi-cultural' and 'diverse', the word 'cosmopolitan' was the catch-all to describe the emerging variety of ethnic and national traditions finding their place in Britain, a rough and ready signifier of the exotic. How appropriate to find it in the title of this eye-catching tour of the capital, a film which reveals not only the city of nations that London had become by the inter-war years, but also a latent suspicion of the new Londoners.

Our tour starts on the beaten track in Central London, with scenes that resemble the city of today - the French café society of Soho, Clerkenwell's Little Italy, and, before the invention of electrical consumer goods, we see Tottenham Court Road with 'its bewildering variety of things foreign'. Each new scene, neatly framed by the camera, bursts with life, each turn of a street corner revealing a new spectacle. The West End as a melting pot of cafés, delicatessens, bookshops, artisans and small businesses, much as we like to imagine it even now.

The tour then takes a wrong turn, proceeding to the cheaper districts of the Monopoly board - to Whitechapel and beyond, where the inter-titles adopt an increasingly hysterical tone as the film records the cramped and over populated districts of Limehouse and Tower Bridge, the home to Chinese, Asian and African seamen and dockers working in the Port of London. A portrait of the unfamiliar, described in outmoded language. Cosmopolitan London serves as a vivid portrait of a city in flux, capturing the commerce and industry of London's new migrants and exposing the immediate legacy of Britain's colonial and trading past.