Drive Through London - July 2007

Imagine you've just arrived in London for the first time from an airport or railway station, and you're taking a taxi ride. What would you see? You would be absorbing the sights of the buildings, people, shops, other vehicles, signs, advert hoardings, driving on the left, and more. When you see a city for the first time like this, it's an intense sensory experience which I hope I have been able to recreate in this episode. This episode takes you through two districts close to the centre of London: Brixton and Victoria. The camera is set up on the dashboard and sees everything I see in front of me as I drive the car through the heart of these places. Technical note: You will notice that this episode has two black bands at the top and bottom of the picture. I positioned the video as a narrower strip than the standard widescreen format because at the bottom of the original video footage is a close-up of the windscreen wiper! Since this does not contribute to the scene it would only take up the attention of the video compressor and soften the more useful parts of the picture. Lowering the picture and taking out the windscreen wiper using black bands means that much less data is absorbed here and the moving images are sharper.