In the early 2000s, two aspiring documentary filmmakers and passionate amateur historians based in London set out on an ambitious project. Armed with cameras, determination, and a burning desire to expose what they saw as a deeply flawed mainstream historical narrative, Keith Dragon and Jim Hatch spent months travelling to London's most iconic sites.

Dragon had been researching alternative historical accounts of London's landmarks for years — filling notebooks, visiting archives, and corresponding with a loose network of independent historians who shared his scepticism of the official record. Hatch, who had worked in local radio, gave the project a voice. Together they made an unlikely but effective team.

The shoot lasted the best part of two years. The team — Dragon, Hatch, cameraman James McGrane, and sound recordist William Pine — worked entirely without institutional support, funding the project themselves and calling in every favour available to them.

Simultaneously, an old friend of the group was shooting his own film: a candid, fly-on-the-wall biographical documentary about the team. This footage — never intended for broadcast — would later prove to be just as compelling as the series itself.

The resulting series — True History (Outside the Echo Chamber) — was raw, uncompromising, and frankly unlike anything seen on British television at the time. Which, as it turned out, was precisely the problem.

Over the course of four years, Dragon and Hatch approached virtually every television channel in the United Kingdom in an attempt to have the series broadcast. The BBC. ITV. Channel 4. Channel 5. Numerous cable and satellite outlets. The response was always the same: silence, a polite decline, or — on one notable occasion — a letter informing them that the series "did not meet the factual programming standards required."

Dragon wrote back asking what those standards were. He did not receive a reply.

The biographical footage from this period is particularly striking. Hatch and Dragon are seen sitting in a McDonald's somewhere in central London, surrounded by rejection letters, methodically planning their next approach. Hatch is eating chips. Dragon is not eating anything. He is reading a letter from Channel 4 and his expression is one of a man who has just been told the sky is green.

Frustrated and ultimately defeated, the project was abandoned in 2007. The tapes were boxed up, sealed with packing tape, and labelled in Dragon's handwriting: "MISC — DO NOT RECYCLE." And there they sat. Gathering dust in a donated-materials pile at a London public library. Forgotten by almost everyone.

Almost.

Both sets of footage have now been painstakingly restored and upscaled to 4K resolution. The original MiniDV tapes — despite spending the better part of two decades in a cardboard box — were in remarkably good condition. William Pine's location audio recordings, captured on a separate DAT recorder, were found in the same box and are reproduced in full.

The two films have been cut together to create something entirely new: a layered, textured viewing experience in which the biographical footage provides context, commentary — and sometimes startling counterpoint — to the historical arguments being made in the original series. Watching Dragon passionately hold forth about the Tower of London, and then immediately cutting to a handheld shot of him arguing with a seagull over a sausage roll, is — it has to be said — one of the great pleasures of the finished work.

The result is television that is as fascinating about the people behind the camera as it is about the history in front of it.

True History (Outside the Echo Chamber) is now available. And this time, nobody can stop it.