The London Nobody Knows is a cult essay-documentary that adapts Geoffrey Fletcher’s 1962 book and has James Mason guide viewers through overlooked corners of the capital. Mason’s sardonic, elegant commentary leads a dérive past crumbling music halls and markets—Camden Town’s Bedford Theatre, Islington’s Chapel Market—and even the Victorian gentlemen’s lavatory at Holborn, sketching a city poised between memory and redevelopment. Against the glossy mythology of “Swinging London,” the film assembles a stark urban time-capsule where battered architecture, social hardship, and stray rituals coexist. Running under an hour, it functions as a concise psychogeographic portrait: the streets become archives; Mason, a flâneur; and the itinerary, a map of ambiences that modernisation threatens to erase.

Source: BFI