Underneath Waterloo Bridge, in a brutalist concrete bunker that most Londoners walk past without noticing, sits the world's largest film archive. Over 50,000 fiction films. More than 100,000 non-fiction titles. Around 625,000 television programmes. Roughly seven million still frames, lined up in steel cabinets. The British Film Institute is, on the surface, a cinema, a publisher, a charity, and a public body. Underneath, it is the memory bank of a country that invented the moving image in the 1890s and has been arguing about what to do with it ever since.
The BFI was founded in 1933 after a report titled The Film in National Life recommended that someone, somewhere, ought to take Britain's moving image culture seriously. The institute's first chair was the 5th Duke of Sutherland, which gives some sense of where moving-image culture sat in the British class hierarchy at the time. Money came from the Privy Council and the Treasury, and the Royal Charter arrived in 1983 with a renewal in 2000. By 2011, after the abolition of the UK Film Council in a government efficiency drive, the BFI absorbed the Council's functions and became responsible for distributing all National Lottery funding for film: currently in excess of £40 million a year. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport provides the largest single chunk of the BFI's budget, around £74 million in 2021-22.
What people actually visit is BFI Southbank, formerly the National Film Theatre, built in 1957 under the southern arches of Waterloo Bridge. It has four screens. Programming runs to retrospectives, restorations, world cinema seasons, and the kind of obscure French silent film you cannot see anywhere else without a region-free Blu-ray player and a lot of patience. The free Mediatheque inside lets anyone walk in and watch otherwise-inaccessible treasures from the National Archive on a personal screen. Across the road, near Waterloo IMAX roundabout, the BFI IMAX cinema houses the largest cinema screen in the UK, with 11,600 watts of digital surround sound and a regular programme of 70mm and 3D presentations. From March 2007 to March 2011 the BFI also ran a contemporary art space called the BFI Gallery, which commissioned new moving-image work by artists including Michael Snow, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and John Akomfrah.
The real treasure is offsite. The BFI National Archive, established in 1935 as the National Film Library and renamed several times since, holds prints, negatives, and tapes at facilities in Hertfordshire and Warwickshire. A £25 million capital investment announced at the 2007 London Film Festival paid for long-overdue upgrades to the storage vaults, where temperature and humidity have to be kept at film-friendly levels around the clock. Most of the collection is British, but the international holdings are substantial: prints saved when their countries of origin lost them, alternative cuts, lost films briefly resurfaced. The BFI 75 Most Wanted list, maintained by the archive, catalogues the films known to have existed but currently missing. A surprising number of items on the list turn up in attics, garage clear-outs, or anonymous donations to small regional museums.
On 29 November 2016, the BFI announced an urgent problem. The institute holds over 100,000 television programmes on videotape, the workhorse format of British broadcasting from the 1960s until the late 1990s. Magnetic tape decays. Best estimates gave the existing tapes a remaining shelf life of five to six years. After that, the binders that hold the magnetic particles to the polyester backing would start to fail, and the recordings would become unplayable. A massive digitisation effort began, race-against-decay style, with the goal of ensuring the television archive will still exist in 200 years. Sight & Sound, the BFI's monthly magazine, has been published continuously since 1932 and runs the most influential international critics' poll of the greatest films ever made every ten years. In 2022 the poll dethroned Vertigo, which had held the top spot since 2012, and crowned Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. People are still arguing about it.
The BFI London Film Festival runs every October and remains one of Europe's major showcases, with several hundred films across two weeks. BFI Flare is one of the longest-running LGBTIQ+ film festivals in the world. The youth-oriented Future Film Festival offers workshops alongside screenings. Education runs through the BFI Film Academy Network, which trains 16-to-25-year-olds in production skills with funding from the Department for Education, Creative Scotland, and Northern Ireland Screen. CEO Ben Roberts has run the institute since 2020. The chair since 2024 is Jay Hunt, a television executive whose appointment was approved by the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. None of this would have surprised the 5th Duke of Sutherland in 1933. The film, somehow, is still on the reel.
BFI Southbank sits on the south bank of the Thames immediately east of Waterloo Bridge, tucked under the bridge arches between the Royal Festival Hall and the National Theatre. The BFI IMAX is the round building at Waterloo IMAX roundabout, sometimes called the bullseye. The London Eye is half a mile west; Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament are directly across the river. Helicopter routes follow the Thames; commercial aircraft pass overhead on London City and Heathrow approaches.
Located at 51.5036 N, 0.1168 W on the South Bank of the Thames, central London. The BFI Southbank sits under the south end of Waterloo Bridge. London airspace is highly restricted; helicopters follow the Thames corridor. London City Airport (EGLC) is approximately five miles east, Heathrow (EGLL) about 14 miles west. View only during commercial overflights at 4,000 to 7,000 feet.