The video of the History of London is the most watched of all NLA videos. Put up on YouTube four years ago it has been seen by over 98,000 people. In the film I give a whistle stop, four minute overview of development in the capital since the days of the Romans.

 

The film was originally produced to be shown in conjunction with the NLA model — an interactive display was projected onto the miniature version of the city, linking the events in the film with their location. It forms part of a series including videos on the Great Estates, Tall Buildings, Infrastructure, housing and roads. It is interesting to compare the number of views each of the films has had. The one on roads comes close behind the history of London with 88,000 views, while housing, which one would imagine is of great interest to an NLA audience, lags way behind at 17,000. It is also curious that the history video scores so well when so much of what we do at NLA is about London fo the future.

 

There is  a video on the new London Plan which we have been planning to update for the last year or so, however while the old London Plan is still in force we have been cautious about reshooting it, waiting to see what the outcome is of the disagreements between City Hall and Whitehall.

 

The history film was made when the population of London was £8.6 million people, the same number that it was in 1939. In the last four years the population has grown closer to £9 million. We wait to see what the combined impacts of COVID-19 and Brexit  will have on those figures.

 

One of my favourite videos on the NLA channel is the New London Model https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SGk1cDSfZw , a minute and a half record of the launch of the enlarged model in 2015. This shows how information is projected onto the model; the confidence of the expanding infrastructure as it streaks across the buildings and the stirring musical accompaniment reflect a very different era than the one we are in now and the one we are about to experience. It reinforces the importance of all that we do at NLA in promoting a better city, looking to the future and providing a voice for positive change.