A summer morning on Falmouth Harbour aboard a restored gentleman’s launch, seeing a familiar town from an unfamiliar angle.
Falmouth is a town we know well. We live here, we work here, and we walk the waterfront most weeks. So when the National Maritime Museum Cornwall asked us to make a short film about their summer Heritage Boat Tours, we assumed we had a fair idea of what the harbour’s history sounded like already. We didn’t.
The tours took visitors out for an hour aboard Jonik, a beautifully restored gentleman’s launch made of polished teak and silver spruce. More a work of art than a working boat. A knowledgeable skipper talked passengers through the wharves, the quays, the old buildings, and the maritime history that shaped the town. It was designed as a way for visitors to see Falmouth from the water, but in practice, it turned out to be just as revelatory for the people who live there.
We shot over a single summer morning. Rich & Grant filming aboard the boat, capturing the skipper mid-commentary and a handful of passengers who hadn’t expected the view to be quite that good.
The thing that stayed with us was how different everything looked from the deck. Buildings we’d walked past a thousand times suddenly made sense. The geography of the port, the way the old wharves were positioned, the reason certain streets angle the way they do. All of it becomes obvious the moment you see Falmouth the way it was meant to be seen: from the water.
The film was made to promote the tours and drive bookings for that summer season. It did its job at the time, and the footage lived on the museum’s website and social channels throughout the run. The tours themselves aren’t currently running, which gives the film a slightly different weight now. Less promotional piece, more small piece of local history. A record of a nice thing that happened for a few summers in Falmouth.
It was also one of those shoots that reminds you why making films in the place you live is genuinely a privilege. We came off the water at lunchtime with a new appreciation for a town we’d thought we already knew.
