East–West: Reflections on the Changing Cinematic Topography of London

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This chapter explores the long history of London films ‘visiting’, and in the process helping to construct, the city’s ‘East End’ and ‘West End’. Over more than a century of London being represented on screen, the East End has traditionally offered more material for drama, often trading on stereotypes, and for nostalgia, especially as East London has changed character through the demise of the docks, the Blitz and regeneration-cum-gentrification. West London, and particularly the West End, has traditionally represented an area of privilege, occasionally visited or aspired to by East Enders. The essay examines depictions of the East and West Ends in the silent era, notably in E.A. Dupont’s Piccadilly (1929), along with post-World War II films, such as It Always Rains on Sunday (1947). Recent films by Noel Clarke, Kidulthood (2006) and Adulthood (2008), have dramatised the tensions of young West Londoners’ lives in an era of conspicuous consumerism and mobility, while Dirty Pretty Things (2002) showed an ‘immigrant London’ that coexists alongside the many other London identities. With the current proliferation of public and private screens in London, and the ability of viewers to create their own images of the city using cameraphones, we may ask: what are the implications for the inventory of past images of London’s East and West End in the twenty-first century?