the modernist x BDP present - The BDP Talk Series. 4.2 - Film Screening and Discussion - 'Song of the Suburbs' with film maker Graham Williamson and author John Grindrod 10/12/25

"With the help of the British Film Institute's Our Screen Heritage programme, I've made a short film remixing nearly a century of archive footage from movies, television, amateur film and video and the internet to tell the story of the British suburbs. Are they conformist or eccentric? Conservative or radical? Normal or surreal? Song of the Suburbs reveals they're all these things, and much more.

Among the things you'll see in this film are: extreme slum clearance allotments, the foundation of the welfare state, poltergeists in suburban London, the North Korean embassy in a suburban semi, the rise of new towns, the fall of the high-rise flat, solstice rituals at Milton Keynes, house name plates, extremely dangerous children's games, a house shaped like a UFO, a child stroking a caterpillar, and a man who has redecorated his entire home in 1970s fashions.

The footage gathered includes TikToks and YouTube travelogues, silent documentaries made by anti-slum campaigners, films by Jill Craigie and Charlotte Regan, animation from Bob Godfrey and Derek Phillips, Super 8 home movies and student films, news reports from Nationwide, government information films and more, all to tell the story of a part of Britain too often mislabelled as boring." 

Graham Williamson is an artist and film-maker whose work frequently examines the social and folkloric history of overlooked places. He co-directed the documentary Where the Stone Dropped, about Teesside's man-made South Gare, and his work was recently shown as part of the exhibition Unsettled Grounds at Scarborough's Old Parcels Office. He is a regular contributor to The Geek Show and Byline Times.