Curled up on a grey velour seat in a padded red booth with an awning above, my cosy nook feels like a mildly more luxurious Eurostar seat. But instead of zipping off to Paris, I’m partaking in some digital time travel, via an extraordinary — and completely free — film and TV archive in central London. I put headphones on and settle into a documentary from 1975 called Noted Eel and Pie Houses.
I started watching it because the title amused me, but was drawn into a compellingly told history of the East End. Moments away from this calm, quiet hub is London’s bustling South Bank , where tourists and locals jostle for space during sunny riverside walks, young men and women fly past on rollerblades and street entertainers launch bubbles the size of blimps into the air, beside the Thames twinkling in the sunshine. It’s busy, and it’s hectic — and as soon as the rain starts falling, it’s often a case of ducking for the nearest cover.
Which is how I first stumbled across this little haven, called Mediatheque, when trying to find a café for a quick bite. Mediatheque is a viewing room for the BFI’s nearly 80,000-strong archive of films and shows, and the result of an endlessly evolving digitisation project. First launched as part of the new BFI Southbank venue in 2007, it was relaunched in 2017 in its current form.
Why should this archive not be freely available for anyone to enjoy, they thought? And why not indeed — so it is now a permanent, free library, with scr.