Experiencing Interruptions?

Jimmy's Archive

"50 years ago today they landed on the moon... and I'm still waiting for that future".

Jimmy's Archive is a collaborative short film by anthropologist Robert Deakin and James ('Jimmy') Watters – a lifelong resident of Poplar, a working-class neighbourhood in the former docklands of east London. Rebuilt according to a modernist masterplan after being heavily bombed during the 2nd World War, today Poplar is undergoing another round of intensive redevelopment in the form of ‘urban regeneration’ which will see formerly public housing replaced with mostly private housing for market sale.

Against this backdrop, Jimmy delves into a cupboard of carefully kept artefacts to tell stories of class, place, music and (still) waiting for the future. Recently having retired after 30 years as a London Black Cab driver Jimmy now spends much of his time at home. But while struggling to come to terms with what 'regeneration' means for him, he finds joy in sharing his collections.

Jimmy's Archive provides an intimate portrait of home, place and ageing in a rapidly changing urban landscape and contributes to thinking and practice around collaborative and multi-modal anthropology. While the editing for the film was done by Robert - interspersed by screening and feedback sessions - the ‘on set’ direction was a collaboration, with Jimmy improvising ‘on stage’ and Robert filming with minimal intervention. As Jimmy delves into his collection the narrative unfolds through a combination of human agency and serendipity.

  • Robert Deakin
    Director
  • James Watters
    Director
  • James Watters
    Key Cast
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Short, Student
  • Runtime:
    24 minutes 59 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    July 1, 2022
  • Production Budget:
    0 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United Kingdom
  • Country of Filming:
    United Kingdom
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    Yes - Goldsmiths College
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
  • European Assocation of Social Anthropologists Conference
    Belfast
    United Kingdom
    July 27, 2022
    UK Premiere
  • Film Geographies, Association of American Geographers Conference
    New York
    United States
    March 1, 2022
  • Association of Social Anthropologists (UK) Conference
    Birmingham
    United Kingdom
    April 11, 2025
Director Biography - Robert Deakin, James Watters

Robert Deakin is a Research Associate in Sociology at Loughborough University. He holds a PhD in Anthropology (Goldsmiths), MA degrees in Social Anthropology (SOAS and the University of California, Davis) and a BA in Human Sciences (Oxford). His research explores people’s experiences and responses to urban and environmental change in contexts of structural inequality. Within this, he pursues collaborative research working across multiple media.

Robert’s PhD examined the entanglements of heritage and urban regeneration in Poplar, east London. Part of this involved an ethnographic exploration of a project to re-establish a pub on a social housing estate undergoing redevelopment as well as co-devising a collaborative film-project alongside a local resident. Attending to several such place-specific regeneration projects through a concept of ‘affective infrastructure’, Robert explored the circumscribed forms of political agency which take shape in this context, with particular attention to intersecting inequalities of race and class. His current research examines contemporary anxieties around the issue of pub closures in the UK, and the impacts pub closure has on people and communities.

James Watters is a largely self-educated collector of artefacts, former London Black Cab driver and life-long resident of Poplar, east London.

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Director Statement

I (Robert – a white, middle class English man in my 30s) met Jimmy (a white, working class English man in his early 60s) during the course of the fieldwork for my PhD. The PhD as a whole explored the multiple interlocking temporalities of displacement in Poplar – a multi-ethnic working class neighbourhood in the former docklands of east London. Today Poplar is undergoing rapid urban change in the form of gentrification, but this overlays longer histories of deindustrialisation, demographic change and racially construed conflict, through which questions of race/whiteness and class are entangled.

The film project set out to explore Jimmy’s sense of displacement from his urban surroundings, to give Jimmy an opportunity to share his personal collections with a broader audience and, in the process, to pose questions about the affectivity of urban change in contemporary London. The sense of longing that Jimmy feels about the past has a melancholic aspect. But the vitality Jimmy draws from sharing his collections on screen demonstrates affective potentials beyond the impasse of 'post-colonial melancholia' (Gilroy, 2004). How then might anthropological research collaborations not only represent the affectivity of urban change and displacement, but also function as a space of encounter and experimentation for the generation of new affects and modes of 'making sense'? (Dattatreyan and Marrero-Guillamon 2019)

Alongside the 25 minute film focusing on Jimmy’s collections we also produced several shorter video clips which were then shared on a dedicated Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/poplarstories.

UPDATE 01/2025: A multimedia essay on our research collaboration has now been published in Roadsides: https://roadsides.net/deakin-012/