Developed from John Grierson's opportunistic recruitment of the well-known director and anthropologist Robert Flaherty, Industrial Britain provides a traditional picture of Britain as is interrupted by industrial stacks billowing smoke. A dramatic illustration of how the young British documentary movement grappled with the influence of the genre’s founding father, Flaherty's ethos was essentially that of a 19th-century conservative individualist, attracted to the elemental extremes of nature and suspicious of the mechanisation of the modern world.