The documentary-maker on how his cherish of architecture has inspired two new films approximately Liverpool and CardiffIn a pair of new TV documentaries,Going Going Gone, the film-maker Nick Broomfield visits two rotting and boarded-up relics of Britain’s 19th-century industrial wealth. One is the baroque-style Coal Exchange in Cardiff, and the other the neoclassical Wellington Rooms in Liverpool. Both were created for moneyed classes – in the decades of Cardiff’s coal boom,traders in the exchange set the world’s price for the commodity; in the Wellington Rooms people made rich by slavery and shipping danced and partied. But both later became favorite venues for the less privileged and ethnically mixed communities in which they stood. The Wellington Rooms were an Irish Centre until the late 1990s; the Coal Exchange was a venue for weddings, parties and concerts until its closure in 2013.
The films are shot in Broomfield’s distinctive style, and in which he himself is a conspicuous presence,sometimes wielding a sound boom, sometimes pleading with unhelpful security staff as the rain falls on his clear plastic mac.
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Source: theguardian.com