"The world's greatest city laid bare!", roars the tagline to London in the raw (1964), a salacious documentary that tours the strip-clubs and underground dives of the still-swinging city. Exploitation maven Arnold Miller combines documentary footage with staged sequences of leering intimacy, showing the skin of belly dancers and strip-teasers once the sun sets, disappearing along with any inhibitions. As the voice-over says, "Eat a little, dance a...

D. W. Griffith reached a pinnacle of expressiveness in this tender yet tragic tale of love and suffering in the seedy Limehouse district of London. Richard Barthelmess gives a sensitive portrayal of a Chinese man who travels to England to spread the pacifist teachings of the Orient, but it is Lillian Gish who illuminates the screen. In this, the most heart-rending performance of her career, she plays a fifteen-year-old street urchin who longs to escape...

In this sumptuous thriller by legendary filmmaker Douglas Sirk and featuring a bevy of classic stars of the silver screen, a serial killer is on the loose in London, luring young women into his web through ads placed in the personal column. Scotland Yard's bait to ensnare the villain is a young American dance hall girl (played by a stunning Lucille Ball), who encounters a series of likely suspects, including the always dashing George Sanders as a...

In October 2002 Anish Kapoor completed his extraordinary sculpture Marsyas for the Unilever series of commissions in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London. A challenging and overwhelming artwork, Marsyas is a vast red PVC membrane stretched between three massive steel rings. The title refers to a satyr in Greek mythology who was flayed alive by the god Apollo. This film follows the making of Marsyas, from the earliest maquettes to the complex installation...

Sense and sensation is a lavish exploration of the arts in eighteenth-century London. Written and presented by the eminent historian John Brewer, and drawn from his highly-acclaimed book 'The Pleasures of the Imagination', the film considers the world of commerce and celebrity in which Georgian culture was created. A world, Brewer argues, that has many parallels with today. John Brewer relates the remarkable stories of entrepreneur Jonathan Tyers,...

The Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron were jointly awarded the 2001 Pritzker Prize, their profession's highest honour, for combining "the artistry of an age-old profession with the fresh approach of a new century's technical capabilities". Over the past twenty years they have been involved in finding inventive architectural solutions to building a diverse range of projects - domestic, municipal and commercial - from a modest switching...