A series of short films we made for the 2020 Totally Thames Festival. Rolling Down the River will take you on a virtual serenaded journey along the Thames, weaving a narrative out of traditional and new songs and shanties in honour of the Thames, its past, its present and its people. Videos produced by CMJ Video

Episode 1: Working People

Hear the distinctive whistles of the Thames lightermen, inspired by birdsong. And we sing of the great Silvertown strike of 1889

Episode 2: Lascar Stories

Bengali sailors have been working on the Thames since the 1700s. Ansar from the Swadhinata Trust tells their stories, and Arghya Kamal sings a Bengali boatmen’s song of lost friends

Episode 3: Shipwrecks

Explore the thousands of wrecks that lie in the Thames, from Roman cargo to Dunkirk little ships, and hear us sing a song by WWI motor launch crew

Episode 4: Pubs

Join us on a virtual pub crawl through the old Thames haunts of Shadwell and Wapping. Hear cautionary songs of drunken sailors and the scrapes they got themselves into

Episode 5: Sweet Thames, Flow Softly

“I met my girl at Woolwich pier beneath the big cranes standing/And oh, the love I felt for her, it passed all understanding” – our new arrangement of Ewan MacColl’s song