“TEMPORI PARENDUM” is the motto of Bishop Auckland Football Club. It means “one must move with the times”.

On Wednesday evening in a packed town hall, there was the world premiere of a new feel-good film which shows how the town of Bishop Auckland is trying to move with the times.

The hour-long Home Town is the work of Chris and Rosie Anderson and a team of 15 volunteers. Using some beautiful drone photography, they give an overview of Bishop Auckland, providing a glimpse into its future and a peek into its past.

When scenes from a film Chris shot in 1974 were shown, a wave of nostalgia rippled through the theatre as we saw Newgate Street and the Market Place thronged with both shoppers and double decker buses – a striking contrast to today’s empty shops and “street wrapping” (a new phrase to me which apparently is the technical term for swathing blank windows in enticing pictures of what could be for sale inside if people hadn’t forsaken the high street for the supermarket and internet).

Perhaps to emphasise how different the Seventies were, the two films being shown at the Odeon cinema were Secrets of a Door to Door Salesman and Run Virgin Run.

An even bigger contrast came with clips from a 1945 film made for the Ministry of Information entitled Near Home. In it, the black-and-white Brylcreamed boys and the skirt-wearing girls of Bishop gather on a hill beneath Brusselton folly. A summer breeze whips through the swishy-swashy grass and waves the leafy boughs of the trees while the youngsters, in tightly-clipped accents and perfectly-formed sentences, ask their teacher, Mr Richards, about the history of the town below them.

The film was commissioned by the Government to promote “self-directed learning”. Rather than sit passively in their desks having facts poured into them, pupils were encouraged to leave their classrooms and search out of information.

Using shaky footage gained from the underside of an aeroplane, Mr Richards gives his pupils an overview and then sends them out to seek for themselves. There are some great footage of the children visiting the West Auckland Clothing Company, Lingford’s baking powder factory, Grange Hill Farm and especially Wilson’s Forge where they trip gaily through the workshop, oblivious to the health-and-safety dangers of the glowing furnaces and the pounding steamhammers.

They even go to the second floor offices in the Market Place of the South West Durham Development Board where, claims Mr Richards, “land utilisation and survey maps were eagerly consulted”.

The 20-minute film ends with the children putting on an exhibition about the town, and the man from the development board, with precise intonation, concludes by commending Mr Richards on giving the children “a real objective view of the town in which they live”. He says: “They have seen the good things and the bad things in the town, its possibilities and its handicaps.”

Bishop Auckland, like most towns, still has possibilities and handicaps. There are complaints that the never-ending building work in the Market Place is handicapping the free flow of traffic, but surely exploiting its history – which is richly portrayed in the new film – is the greatest possibility Bishop has for moving with the times into a prosperous future.

N Home Town is being shown for a second time due to public demand on April 28 at 7pm in Bishop Auckland Town Hall. Tickets are £5 from the box office, on 03000-269524. Proceeds to Butterwick Hospice. Near Home can be seen at player.bfi.org.uk and put “Near Home” into the search box.