With their community lacking a local film venue, the Thamesmead Travelling Cinema was set up in 2020 to finally give the people of Thamesmead in south-east London a communal space to watch films. In this blog, Lydia de Matos interviews the project’s founders, couple Vanessa and Liam Scully, on their cinema’s nomadic roots and their experience so far.
Lydia: Thamesmead seems so tied to UK film history, with some of the most iconic sequences from A Clockwork Orange filmed there, and yet the area never had a cinema until you both founded the Travelling Cinema last year. Was there something particular that spurred you to do so? And to do it in the way you did — community-focused, travelling, quite literally built from the ground up?
Liam: We set up Thamesmead Texas in 2018, a space for the new artist community in the area to come together. It started in our living room, and then moved to different locations. With rents going up, it’s difficult for an arts space to remain in one place — so we always saw it as nomadic.
Vanessa: And then we were given a Heritage Lottery Fund commission in 2019 to gather oral histories from people in the local community whose stories hadn’t been told, and to produce an exhibition which would display those stories as an experimental film. And what kept coming up was lack of investment in Thamesmead. That included cultural infrastructure. So, for example, a cinema was always promised but never delivered. We decided to produce a legacy project showing films representative of the people we were interviewing so that the wider community could get a better understanding of their cultures. So we appropriated our budget and built a cinema from reclaimed local materials.
Lydia: How have things evolved during the first year and a half? Was there anything you envisaged that wound up being impractical?
Vanessa: Initially we were very idealistic. There’s a Traveller community in Thamesmead, and they’re often out on horse and cart, and it’s magical to see, so we actually originally wanted to create a horse-drawn cinema, which obviously wound up being completely impractical.
Liam: The name Thamesmead Texas actually came from that, our first impression of Thamesmead with the horses tethered to the brutalist blocks, and the open skies and marshland.
Vanessa: There were other blue sky ideas as well: having solar panels, being 100% environmentally sustainable, and having screenings determined by the seasons, none of which wound up being fully possible.
Lydia: You’ve held screenings at varied locations around Thamesmead, how does the decision-making process work with choosing where works best? Do practicalities change significantly location-to-location?
Liam: We have our anchor venue, the Lakeside Centre, which is where our studio is, and practically that’s very easy, we can keep the cinema parked there, our studio provider (Bow Arts) supports us in many ways. And when we began travelling, we had to work out the practicalities of that, how it’s done, who tows it; there were legal formalities about the weight and the generator, etc. All of last year we only travelled it once, to a local square, and that was supported by Peabody, so they brought in a generator and a technician, but this year we’ve worked completely independently.
Vanessa: We try to select places that are already known to the local community, so we go to parks and squares often. That way we can increase audience capacity as well, because at the Lakeside Centre we’re limited with space and seats, whereas in a park people can bring blankets, and it becomes a sort of community picnic. And that goes hand-in-hand with our programming. So, for example, for our screenings in Birchmere Park this summer, we chose childhood classics with inter-generational appeal, so that whole families could come and watch together. Before that though, we tested the cinema in the marshes, for a shoot with a filmmaker who has supported the cinema and wanted it to feature in her new work.
Liam: Thamesmead has a really unique eco-system; there’s the Thames, ancient woodland, ancient marshland, and the brutalist urban environment, so it’s quite exciting to have those possibilities, and we’d like to go screen in all those different places, with films that match the landscapes.
Lydia: You’ve both lived and worked in Thamesmead for quite a few years now, but you don’t have as strong roots as some; did you find the more long-standing community receptive to you building the cinema? How did you build the audience?
Vanessa: With the oral histories project, we continued talking to the people we’d met beyond the interviews, and many became friends. And through that ongoing informal discussion, we floated the idea of a cinema, and people were really receptive to it, so we felt like we were given permission to run with it and make it a reality. And to honour their voices and concerns, we decided on a co-programming approach, which is how we crafted last year’s world cinema season.
Liam: Through the interviews, we were talking with Nigerian and West African communities, Nepalese communities, the Traveller community, Indian diaspora communities, and so for example, we found that there was a big Nollywood community in Thamesmead; residents who had directed and shot and acted in Nollywood films. Notably, we met Ruke Amata, who’s part of a filmmaking dynasty, his family were instrumental in starting Nollywood in the early 90s, and we invited him to our Nollywood weekender, showcasing some of his films. So that was our co-programming approach, inviting someone with an existing audience or network, and bringing them to the cinema, which then would hopefully return for other community events. So over the months, we built a really diverse audience. And for each of the events, we would invite a caterer and a musician specific to the culture we were celebrating, and almost create a mini-festival each weekend.
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Lydia: Have you found that the audience has changed while you’ve been running the cinema? Especially with the new Elizabeth line, are there more central Londoners finding their way over?
Liam: Since the Elizabeth line is so recent, it’s difficult to determine. For example, the last screening we held was A Clockwork Orange, and it was the most successful we’ve done in terms of numbers. But around 70% of the audience were from outside of Thamesmead, whereas usually it’s the other way around. It could be because of the notoriety of the film, because of the fifty-year anniversary, but there’s also the Elizabeth line. We did notice there was a different atmosphere to that screening though, typically people hang around before and after, whereas at this one people didn’t really mingle in the same way.
Vanessa: But we see that now as a challenge to encourage the new audience to come and mix with the existing audience, and maybe we need to find different ways to do that.
Lydia: Do you worry about an expanding audience potentially taking away from the community focus which is so core to the cinema?
Liam: It’s definitely a concern. We don’t want it to turn into mostly working professionals from central London, especially because we’ve only got so many tickets. So we have to think about solutions to keep things balanced. We’re both from working class backgrounds and grew up in small towns, where there wasn’t much access to art and culture. And we see that in Thamesmead, so our mission is to engage the people here in our programmes.
Lydia de Matos is a student, filmmaker, and writer based in London. She’s a lover of community cinema, and you can usually find her raving about Agnès Varda or John Berger, often at the same time.
You can find out more about the Thamesmead Travelling Cinema via their website or Instagram.