The film has been screened at a number of academic conferences, classrooms and also a pub in east London, with Jimmy and I participating in a Q&A. If anyone would be interested to screen the film, we’d be very open to that – please get in touch.

And just as importantly, to give Jimmy a much-desired audience with which to share his thoughts, feelings and good humour.

Meanwhile, critical writing responds with suspicion of nostalgia and melancholia. In contrast, Jimmy’s Archive does not try to make an overt political argument. Instead as a piece of ethnographic documentary film it invites the audience to get to know Jimmy – the person, the character.

TV depictions of ‘the last whites of the east end’ present east London as a former bastion of a White Working Class that has lost out through policies of multiculturalism, feeding the kinds of righteous anger found in contemporary right-wing populist politics.

Indeed, many of the people that Jimmy grew up with left the area long before gentrification arrived in Poplar. Such questions of home, place, demographic change, and belonging are vexed in east London and Britain more broadly - often tied up with forms of racialised resentment.

whereby working-class neighbourhoods are transformed into more upmarket areas and many of their existing inhabitants displaced - but also, in relation to longer running processes of deindustrialisation and demographic change.

The film emerged out of a broader filmmaking collaboration which explored Jimmy’s difficult and ambivalent emotional relationship to urban change. Jimmy's complex feelings need to be understood in relationship to gentrification -

It explores Jimmy's relationship to home, place, class, music and ageing through a collection of objects and memorabilia kept in a cupboard in his one-bedroom flat.

Great to hear from you Kelly. Thanks for your interest!

Thanks James!

Our case studies attempted to capture some of the diversity of pubs and the communities that they serve, across rural-urban geographies and regions. Stay tuned for future long-reads regarding closed pubs in coastal South Wales, city center Manchester, suburban Birmingham and rural Hertfordshire.

McGlynn's, Kings Cross.

An Irish pub which closed suddenly in 2023 after the death of its long term licensee. Celebrated in the media and popular with a wide-range of people, we explore the convivial qualities of this much lamented pub.

after-last-orders.lboro.ac.uk/mcglynns/

The Litten Tree, Coventry.

Part of a 1990s hybrid pub-bar-nightclub chain which collapsed in 2007, it was run independently as a budget-friendly boozer before closing in 2023. To be demolished in a city-centre regeneration scheme.

after-last-orders.lboro.ac.uk/the-litten-t...

The Three Lions, Meden Vale.

A large, multi-room 1960s pub in a former Nottinghamshire mining village, it was the village's last informal meeting space. Closed on New Years Eve 2021, it is due to make way for a 41 unit housing development.

after-last-orders.lboro.ac.uk/the-three-li...

Hadn't noticed this - great!

the pub is more often represented as a space of national cohesion, without which the ‘social fabric’ of the nation might fall apart. (4/4)

as well as their multiple forms of exclusion and inequality across distinctions of race, class and gender. Whereas previous research has highlighted the ways pub closure has been articulated in relation to a figure of an aggrieved ‘white working class’ our research finds that (3/4)