Description: A curious tour around the urban district of Ruislip and Northwood following a moustachioed middle aged man. The film begins with shots from his Ford Consul car travelling into Eastcote. The car stops and he is filmed getting out. He holds a black bound book marked 'Ruislip-Northwood Scrap Book'. He opens up the book to a photograph of a street, which he compares to the street before him (Field End Road leading up to Eastcote tube station). He gets back in his car and drives on. He parks at a building site and gets out. Large houses punctuate a landscape over parkland. The man walks amongst some modern single storey flatted roofed buildings and looks over some larger Georgian houses. There follow short views of the Black Horse public house, an old house called 'Old Forge' with an anvil out front and a modern bungalow. The man consults his scrapbook again as he looks over a development of new houses. A woman gets a young man to help her pick some mushrooms from trays in a darkened outbuilding. The man gets back in his car and drives on. In a different location there are shots of The George Public House on Bury Street, a public water pump, St Martin's Church , and the Swan public house (all on Ruislip High Street), and the Urban District Council of Ruislip-Northwood Municipal Bowling Green. A quick look at a sign reading Kings College Road precedes views of the man smoking a cigarette and looking disinterestedly at a sports ground. An incongruous shot of Kings College Cambridge is followed by a shot of a different man pouring over an old map. There follows another shot from the front of a speeding car, a woman pulls out on a moped and it appears that the car will hit her, the screen goes white and the film ends.
Comments
The "modern single storey flatted roof buildings" which appear in the film were behind Haydon Hall and some are still there. I recall they were Ruislip-Northwood UDC (as it then was) buildings, but there were also civil defence properties behind the Hall too, this being the era when nuclear war was a real threat.
I have no idea what the purpose of the film was, clearly the man is revisiting old haunts in Eastcote and Ruislip, but the "mushroom interlude" is a mystery. He follows a route which I often take myself from Eastcote tube station to Eastcote House grounds, on to Haydon Hall and then back to Eastcote village which is much more built up now and then to the historic core of Ruislip and the King's College playing fields. These are all still clearly identifiable today, but I suspect had changed much in the driver's lifetime. Fascinating for me though and I'm glad I found it. There is very little motion picture material about this area still available.