It is one of British music’s best-known videos – and it was filmed in Greenwich 30 years ago this week.
On August 8 and 9, 1994, Blur, filmed their promo for Parklife outside the Pilot pub and set of cottages on the Greenwich Peninsula. It was directed by Pedro Romhanyi.
In the decades since, the area around River Way has utterly changed, and the street itself has all but vanished. But the houses and pub at the centre of the video have survived.
Back in 1994, River Way was a side street which led down to the Thames and the original base of Greenwich Yacht Club. The Pilot pub and the cottages are the last surviving houses of a settlement which was intended to be called New East Greenwich. All the other houses had long been demolished for industrial development.
The homes were low-cost housing, but were bought by the New Millennium Experience Company as the year 2000 approached and the residents made to leave.
The gates you see on the left were once part of Blackwall Point Power Station. The bend in the distance, which was where a railway line to the gas works once crossed, remains as part of the entrance to what remains of the street.
The other side of the road was just the fenced-off remains of the old gas works. The film-makers painted various fences. One Canada Square sits alone on the skyline along with the old East Greenwich No 1 gasholder, which survived until 2020.
Nowadays there is a view of the peninsula’s Central Park and the O2.
Look the other way towards the Thames, and you’ll see how much things have changed – even in the past few years. The view in 1994 was past the remains of the power station…
Now hundreds of flats, not yet a decade old, sit on the land.
It’s hard to track the route of where River Way used to run…
…but follow the last section of Reminder Lane and you’ll reach the point by the river where Phil Daniels sups a nice cup of tea.
The Pilot’s beer garden starred in a scene at the end of the video…
Despite its isolated location, the pub was thriving with a popular restaurant attached, As the millennium approached, the owner is said to have refused offers to buy him out, but eventually sold to Fuller’s in 2006.
All the other locations in the video – save for a brief shot of the Sun-in-the-Sands roundabout – are close by. The spot where Phil Daniels sits in a traffic queue is at Boord Street, which was once a lorry park and is now part of the Silvertown Tunnel construction site.
Other spots are now off-limits. Daniels and Albarn can be seen driving down Dreadnought Street, next to an old school now used as storage space for the Horniman Museum. This street is now part of an expanded slip road from the Blackwall and new Silvertown tunnels.
The pair can also be seen driving on Ordnance Crescent, a street which used to loop behind the Blackwall Tunnel, but the site has now been obliterated for the Silvertown Tunnel entrance.
Romhanyi also directed the video for Common People by Pulp, but fans aren’t able to visit the 70s dancefloor featured in it – Stepney’s Nightclub, across the river in Commercial Road, has been boarded up and derelict for years.
But Blur fans can visit where Parklife was shot. They have one person to thank for the preservation of the cottages – historian and former Greenwich councillor Mary Mills got them listed in 1998, when they were threatened with demolition. What surrounds them is still changing as Knight Dragon, the Greenwich Peninsula developer, is still building. River Way will be in a very different setting when the 40th anniversary of the video comes around.
Further reading: Mary Mills has written a history of the cottages and the surrounding area, while A London Inheritance has photographs from the 1980s and before. There are also production shots taken from the shoot.
Blur’s Live at Wembley Stadium album is available now.
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