This Town

Set against the industrial decline and social unrest of Birmingham and Coventry in the early 1980s, This Town could easily have been a bleak and uncompromising portrayal of the period.

I decided that the story deserved much more than that so I chose to approach its visual world through the energy and optimism of youth, music and the desire to escape the limitations of the previous generation.

Paying justice to this eternal generational conflict of the next generations urge to break free from the previous restrictions in a period that many living today can still vividly remember I wanted it, rather than making it feel like a factual documentary, to feel like a memory - heightened, colourful and slightly dreamlike, recalling the excitement of a summer when everything still seemed possible.

The design concept development

The story of This Town, apart from being the story of a band against the backdrop of the 1981 Midlands in the UK, is that of two family strands living in different towns, Birmingham and Coventry, connected through the M6, a large national motorway cutting straight through the British Midlands.