Lowland Village (1942)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 พ.ค. 2011
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The British Council Film Collection is an archive of more than 120 short documentary films made by the British Council during the 1940s designed to show the world how Britain lived, worked and played. Preserved by the BFI National Film Archive and digitised by means of a generous donation by Google, the films are now yours to view, to download and to play with for the first time.
A brief look at the heritage and development of the traditional lowland villages of east England. Lowland Village focuses on the timeless local industries and the pervasive impact of agriculture to give an insight into the daily life of the various hard-working villagers.
This film feels very short, and the narrative is given in fits and starts, with long shots of traditional crafts such as blacksmithing and ploughing.
The war is not mentioned at all. The overall impression given is of villages that are relatively unchanging but nonetheless charming and productive.
There is a distinct bias towards the work of the villagers, rather than the community.
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Videos like this are so comforting and relaxing and I love how they spoke back then.
Yes English is a dying language.britain is now a holiday camp for people from around the empire that was.
What a beautiful video. How hard it must have been at that time. That is what I call hard work. Real men. Thank you for sharing this video.
This is a treasure of bygone times Thank you for posting!
What a beautifully-photographed film of an age now long past: very nostalgic!
Bruce Anderton Right in the middle of World War 11.
If its Lavenham it still looks like that👍
@@trajanofrome4750 Those people are gone now, replaced by others living in a different world.
@@jonka1 ...as those people replaced the previous generations who lived in a yet different world.
These films are so lovely - thank you so much for putting up such valuable records of our past.
A gentle archive.
Just charming. So glad there was a camera there, absolutely nothing like actual VISUAL documentation of times gone by. Some interviews with the villagers would have been a nice touch, but perhaps those are in other films. Thanks for sharing this. I just love England.
You echo my thoughts!
Interviews with the locals would've meant taking along sound equipment as well which was an extra expense and probably not feasible during wartime.
At 1.50 the place on the right is now the wonderful swan hotel, we just come back . the town is Lavenham in suffork , beautiful place
I've lived in the rural south-west of England my whole life, and so I'm familiar with villages mostly in Devon, Cornwall and Somerset, but even being elsewhere in England, this wonderful video of rural village life of yesteryear is familiar and nostalgic to me. So much has changed in the last century, yet some villages still look very much the same (except instead of one or two cars as seen in this video, there are now parked cars bumper-to-bumper on both sides of the road, and somehow two-way traffic squeezing through as well).
Oh, to go back to those days!
Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could go back to those times they certainly weren't workshy not like today break a fingernail and it's a week off work.😅😅
Beautiful, a bygone age which we will never see again
A simpler and harder life back then, but I think I prefer it in some ways to the place we live in today.
It wasn't harder people were brought up learning life skills there was hard work but people had pride in their homeland and communities lovely times ❤
That’s because you didn’t have to live there. The work for farm labourers was back breaking and poorly paid. Most were unable to continue into their fifties. The houses were largely unheated and the diet limited. Holidays were short and no one went abroad. There was little entertainment beyond the radio ( three stations) and newspapers. Very few people had a car or telephone.
Beautifully narrated😊 An excellent insight into 1940s village life, when everything was simple then and appreciated, before the age of technology etc!!!!
I grew up in a country village in Hampshire at this time. Everyone in the village would turn out to help with the harvest. We were near the sea, so no shortage of fresh fish! The village was virtually self sufficient with a variety of shops; it was very much a "pull together" community. Despite rationing and lack of heat; how I miss those times.
Groceries
Thank you so much for such excellent videos
This reminds me of film reels I watched in 1960's elementary school. Thank you.
in the usa
@@lindabingham394 Canada.
When the film ended we children clapped too (also in the 1960s).
A fascinating look at farming not so long ago. Thanks for posting
Must be lavenham as it was wool that made it prosperous. What a beautiful, simpler way of life. Hard work though.
Tough people that worked hard for all d community better times 😢😢
Lovely to think this is how my dear old Nan grew up, in 1940s Suffolk.
That is the world of my Grandad & Grandma.
I wish more of England's homes were further set back from the road with lawns and trees in front and all around each house.
I believe it's Lavenham, in Suffolk. The timbered houses and the church certainly look like Lavenham.
No question, this is Lavenham, Suffolk, the most complete medieval Town in Britain. A real gem, I visited it 10 years ago, and some of the houses had been smartened up, but not spoiled.
Tis
Yep!
Yes, the church certainly looks like it
Thank you, I was wondering where it was.
Beautiful. Loved the dog by the electric fire! No texting, no fax, no email when a tradesperson was admired not requiring a high technical or professional education to prosper.
I'm afraid that they didn't actually prosper, cheaper food from the Empire meant that there was a great deal of poverty and lack of funding between the wars.
@@davidhampson765 Thats right, blame the Empire!!!
I think you'd struggle to find a fax machine in Lavenham these days.
@@katieperry3998 He's blaming historical fact.
@@davidhampson765 Damn! All that butter, cheese, lamb, beef and fruit that we produced so efficiently and cheaply. We should have charged Britain more for it. It certainly wasn't our lower priced agricultural goods that stopped Britain from joining the EEC and forsaking us.
Great films, a good look at what we have lost as a country.
Interesting article on London in the latest Harpers. (March 2017)
I love Documentaries like this nice feeling to it.
I love these episodes!💖💚
Lovely film - astonishing that they were able to make it during the war (1942)?
Wow So glad that I found this channel!
We as a country need to talk about the impact of the motor car. We need more rail, better bus services, more delivery services, and less car ownership (even by the rich). Each year car manufacturers come up with bigger and bigger cars, its all so unnecessary. We live on a small island, and that fact needs to be addressed.
We also need to discuss immigration. Britain is not for everyone in the world.
I've lived in the UK for over 50 years - in village, small town, large town and city. I haven't owned a car for nearly 30 years (most of my adult life).
I have holidays, weekends away and day trips all over rural and semi-rural Britain. In the last few months I've been all over Cheshire, parts of the Peak District, Cumbria, North Wales, East Sussex, Cornwall, the Calder Valley and more. All by train and bus.
It's entirely possible. People just don't want to.
When I lived in England I lived in several places and one of them was a village with three short streets of houses and a newsagents.
How wrong they got it in predicting the future. The life they show here has long gone and will never return!!. These lovely villages are no longer places of community. They are now over priced desirable properties for the rich!. Land which was once under the plough is now under tarmac and concrete. It makes me sad, this was a snippet of how rural England was......never to return!!.
We can return. Deurbanisation is possible.
Nonsense. Whole swathes of most counties are still just quiet, unassuming villages that very few people have heard of. I grew up in Cheshire. It was (and still is) quite a lot like this.
Lavenham Suffolk dates back before the 9th Century.
Santa, can I have a Time Machine for Christmas this year please ?
Back in the days when people dressed nicely to go out in public.
How can our lifestyle leap so much in so little timespan, compared with all of history.?
It looks like a deliberate revealing of knowledge, after all why did man's best brains not make these discoveries long ago.? Did our brains change.?
WONDERFUL TIMES.
8.15, doggy ready for a snooze!
paul broderick Yes he’s beautiful!
Most interesting!
8:57 is 'The Swan' at Lavenham, Suffolk.
The village shown is Lavenham in Suffolk.
Couldn't agree with you more. The plague of ugly modernist design and short-term opportunist planning has done more harm to the aesthetics of the English landscape than the battalions of German aircraft managed.
Lytton333 hear hear, old bean.
Indeed. BUT, the churches, government buildings and the Council House will remain totally immune. Brought up in Coventry, a medieval town before the war, the same nonsense prevailed.
Er...yes. But they were squadrons, not 'battalions'.
@@wayinfront1 You just might have missed his point.
Little to do with buildings or planning. If you look at current views of Lavenham on Streetview you will see that many of the old buildings shown in this film still exist. But they are prettified empty shells because the village economy that created them no longer exists and they are just residences for the rich.
Does anyone know today's Villages still exist they're so wonderful I like to think that if I went to Britain today I could find one of these Villages and spend a few days there they're so lovely I just hope they're not filled with McDonald's and shopping malls like they are the United States we have no Villages the ones we had now or just deserted I think maybe some of them are coming back because the mall is on his way out thank God
I doubt you'd find a village like this one. That's not to say that there aren't still small villages/towns, but they're not stuck in the 40s or 50s.
Thanks to others on here would have identified this village as Lavenham.
If you Google Street map the village now you'll see how completely choked it is with cars and vans.
We accept this as normal but its quite a shock to watch this video then look at it today, the comparison is really quite depressing.
But where would we be without our cars?
Wow.
9:13 now where can I get one of those glasses?
Must've contained a quart of ale.
I always tend to notice English skies. Cloud formations over England appear to me to be somewhat unique to the land and sea meetings.
So many of the fields in eastern England would become airfields and familar country sounds overwhelmed with the roar of aero engines.
Not least RAF Lavenham. Home to the 487th Bomb Group equipped with B-17s and B-24s. About two miles north of the village. Despite being closed in 1948 the runway outline is still pretty clear on Google Earth. www.google.com/maps/place/52%C2%B008'10.0%22N+0%C2%B046'15.6%22E/@52.1361062,0.7622489,2933m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m14!1m7!3m6!1s0x47d9aca079484581:0xfee9771e59ae2609!2sLavenham,+Sudbury,+UK!3b1!8m2!3d52.1075894!4d0.7954572!3m5!1s0x0:0x0!7e2!8m2!3d52.1361029!4d0.7710059
Oh for a time machine.
Dear British Council TH-cam Team,
Just wondering if it would be at all possible to use various clips from some of your archive films, to comp together to make a music video for our original song called "Come to town"
We are unsigned singer-songwriters from London called BlackDogHat.
Many thanks
John Sage
Hello +BlackDogHat,
Thank you for your message. I've contacted the rights owner and will let you know when I hear back from them.
Many thanks,
Charlotte
+British Council
Thank you so much Charlotte,
John
@@BlackDogHat So . . .
It's been 5 years since they promised to let you know about the copyright issue.
What was the result?
🤔
(asking for a friend)
😃
@@BrassLock Hi Dav,
No ... still waiting :)
Hope all's well
Cheers
John
BDH
@@BlackDogHat Oh! Dear!
That's such a shame. Other people simply seem to change the sound track or the aspect ratio of bits they want to use, then just go ahead hoping its fair use for educational purposes or some such contrivance. Periscope Films has access to a huge stockpile of films they are restoring perhaps they could assist you in your search for suitable clips. Cheers.
The first few minutes is my village lavenham Suffolk ❤
How does it compare with today?
anyone know the name of this village?
What's the name of the village? I'd like to see how much this particular one has changed since 1942.
As John Rainer says, it is Lavenham, not much has changed except for motor cars and it's very posh.
Yes, it's Lavenham. The monument at 2.17 can be seen on Google maps at www.google.co.uk/maps/@52.1090993,0.7964307,3a,75y,45.56h,86.02t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s1wOAhrUeSxyxq9bpPQRo0A!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
@@davidhampson765 well I was allowed in
08:26 look at the size of that fireplace, sure it was used to spit-roast chicken.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavenham
All the mod cons, gas electricity and motor cars. What about Wi-Fi!
Now we are not dependent on the land. We are stuck, caught in a trap, where our modern lives are dependent on imports from Yankee Empire. We have been neutered.
Ironic listening to the commentary about the ancient villages, housing and architecture, the same places the English were bombing in Germany for no reason other than the destruction of 1000 years of history.
I think you are getting mixed up with he Baedekker raids of 1942-43. That was a German philosophy, to target our history and centres of culture. Cities like Canterbury, wih no war production or strategic value suffered terribly.
And exactly what the Germans had done to Poland? Perhaps Germany should not have started the war?
@@neilsmith7174 Poland spent 20 years engineering this war.
@@neilsmith7174 Germany didn't start WW2, Hitler did.
@@richardcurry4912 Oh yes, to be conquered by their two mortal enemies, Germany and Russia. I'm sure that was right at the top of their list. After being taken over by The Soviet Union in 1945 the Polish saying was "The Soviet Union forever, but not a day longer".
Cows must always be herded down the main street😂