There is a long tradition of depicting London in the film either as “a glamorous and glorious organism” or city  dwelled by its “seedy and forgotten underbelly”. Wartime documentaries celebrated the struggle of the Blitz (Listen to Britain) and inspired Free Cinema documentary-movement connect both to the social realism and heroism of the everyday London life of the 1950s. The “technicolour dream” of Swinging London was a much anticipated antidote to the previous grimness of showing London this way  and thus created a cliched pop-cultural model to present London as the ultimate pop-city.

The London Nobody Knows (Norman Cohen, 1967) was an exceptional documentary oddity made in the atmosphere of Swinging London, trying to show the uncleaned backgarden of the swinging sixties. The film is a tour of London, narrated by James Mason, and based on the book by Geoffrey Fletcher. It is a snapshot of late 1960s London and is a fascinating time capsule of the remnants of a bygone age before the capital's extensive redevelopment in the late 1960s and 70s.

Presented as a social realist comment on the euphoric sentiment of late-sixties British pop-culture, it also influenced 40 years later two pop-documentaries trying to seek the soul of London and to translate it to the musical documentary. Saint Etienne Presents Finisterre (2003) was a hymn to London taking a form of a journey from the suburbs to the heart of the city, with a score by dance music pioneers Saint Etienne. The film was a poignant ‘psycho-geographical’ drama that celebrated the English capital in all its seediness and glory. 

Also inspired by The London Nobody Knows, London group Madness made with director Julian Temple a visual tribute (The Liberty Of Norton Folgate, 2009) to their working-class roots celebrating the forgotten and hidden ‘dickensian’ London also immortalised in the songs from the same-titled album. I will ask in this paper how and why London pop culture after the 1960s has been trying to reinvent the swinging portrayal of the city inspired by the psycho-geography of unglamorous and hidden London represented in The London Nobody Knows.