Summer in the city

I’m not any kind of transportation anorak who gets all swoony over buses and trains but I felt my heart sigh a little watching some of the lovely old documentaries now up at the The London Transport Museum website. Of particular interest is the wonderful All That Mighty Heart, a day-in-the-life film about London shot on a hot summer day in 1962 full of gleaming red buses driven by men with shiny Brylcreemed hair, pretty young housewives in modern new shopping centres, tennis at Wimbledon, cricket at Lords, kids enjoying a day at London Zoo and making sandcastles on the banks of the Thames (really!), all shot in vibrant you-never-had-it-so-good colour.

All That Mighty Heart is even more special to me as I was born in the summer of ’62 which according to my mother was a hot one and she often told me of the time my old man took her to see Lawrence of Arabia that summer and she had to sit through a three-hour film in a stuffy, non-air conditioned cinema while heavily pregnant with me. She suffered for me, you know.

Also worth a butchers is London On The Move made in 1970 showing a city that I actually remember, particularly those red tube trains with the green interior which brought a lot of happy memories flooding back.

So does this record, though not quite such old ones.

Download: Riding On A Train – The Pasadenas (mp3)