Travel films have a long and very grand tradition in British cinema.

The idea of movement through the landscape by train, car and plane has been celebrated throughout British film in a mix of documentary and drama. In response to films like Letter to Timothy and Nightmail, more recent filmmakers have taken on the travelogue form to make new narratives of travel and new assessments of Britain as a social as well as geographical locus.

Here movement through the landscape, film's gift to the landscape artist, suggests a thought process. Borrowing from traditions of the Grand Tour, Andrew Kötting's Gallivant and Patrick Keiller's Robinson in Space, for instance, assess the nation by the people and places the filmmakers encounter on their journeys. In turn, the journeys reveal in their own arbitrariness the inequalities in experience and the discrepancies in landscape that make up a single nation. Both films ultimately call into question how national identity is created from purely geographical means.

Stuart Marshall creates a humorous tourist video of San Francisco's favourite views in The Streets of, whereas Anna Thew's entrancing double screen film Fragments for Eyedrift is an encounter with spaces, cities and people in a journey across Europe.