Town Settlement

A sun-kissed Saxmundham in Suffolk is the subject of this efficient, attractively shot educational film. With help from some fun animated models, we learn why the town's Viking founders chose to settle here (their boats could go no further up the river Fromus, while the gently sloping valley meant plentiful water and fertile soil), and get an introduction to local crop and livestock farming. With horse-drawn ploughs and laboriously hand-cut sugar beet, life in this 1930s Saxmundham may have changed less since the time of the Domesday Book than it has since this film was made.

An opening intertitle warns us that "The relief in the models has been deliberately exaggerated" - just in case we're fooled into thinking that Suffolk has mountains to match the Himalayas. Surprisingly, though, there's no similar disclaimer about the models re-enacting the arrival of the Viking boats - which appear to dwarf some of the smaller Scottish islands! Town Settlement was the first in a film series titled Economic Geography, released by Gaumont-British Instructional Films, which dominated the important educational films market in the 1930s with its skilfully made documentaries.