The British cinema has drawn extensively on our national landscapes. Filmmakers have explored the entrenched myth of an idyllic rural tradition, intimately bound up with a popular definition of national heritage. Conversely, within a documentary-realist framework, they have looked at the contemporary urban aesthetic, derived partly from a Victorian tradition of social investigation.

Contents: Notes on Contributors; Introduction; Alan Burton and Laraine Porter; Location, Location, Location: Landscape, Place and Travel in British Cinema Before 1930; Bryony Dixon (Curator of Silent Film at the BFI's National Film and Television Archive); On Location in Edwardian Britain: Urban and Rural Violence; Tony Fletcher (founder member of The Cinema Museum in London); The Marketing of Landscapes in Silent British Cinema; Paul Moody (lecturer in Media Studies at Uxbridge College); Narrative and Pictorialism in Post-Pioneer Hepworth Films; Simon Brown (senior lecturer in Film Studies at Kingston University); Pastoral Transformations in 1920s British Cinema; Christine Gledhill (Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Sunderland); "The Plucky Girl" and the "Pigeon to Pluck": Characters, Locations and Entertainment Forms in Rogues of London; Judith Cowan (archive researcher at the ITN archive working on the Reuters Collection); Trainers and Temptresses: The British Racing Drama; Judith McLaren (teacher of English at St Paul's School in London); The First Cameraman in Iceland: Travel Film and Travel Literature; Ivo Blom (lecturer in Film Studies at the Department of Comparative Arts Studies of the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam); The Anglo-Boer War in North London: A Micro-Study; Ian Christie (Professor of Film and Media History, Birkbeck College London); Everyone's Doing the Riviera Because It's So Much Nicer in Nice; Amy Sargeant (Senior Research Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for the Study of British Art and Architecture); The City of the Future; Patrick Keiller (films include London (1994) and Robinson in Space (1997); research fellow at the Royal College of Art in London); Co-operation and the Contestation of Public Space; Alan Burton (teacher at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria); Billy Merson's Monologue: Blighted My Life; Mick Eaton (recent TV work includes 'Shipman', a factual drama about Britain's most prolific serial murderer); Index.