"It was a case of looking around at what was going on and seeing a ship being built at the end of the street. It was visually staggering." So remembers Peter Roberts, co-director of Launch, of his motivation for making the film in the early 1970s.

Shot in and around Swan Hunter's busy shipyards at Wallsend, North Tyneside, Launch depicts the building and christening of not one but two ships which were made there, the World Unicorn and the London Lion. As members of the Amber Collective and art graduates, Roberts and co-director Murray Martin were struck by the incredible imagery and sculptural quality of the shipyards and the surrounding industrial landscape, and decided to film them. They sought and were given unlimited access to the ships and the yards, and loading their wind-up, hand-held Bolex camera with Kodachrome film, arrived there with no greater ambition, at first, than simply to record what they saw. But having started work on a collective riverside project several years later, they found in the film's rushes an eloquent eulogy to a lost community and to Britain's industrial past.

In this short film, we took Peter Roberts back to a very different Wallsend and asked him to reminisce about his experiences of making Launch almost 40 years ago.