Joe Bloom’s View From a Bridge

This story is originally published in Huck 83: Life Is a Journey – The 20^th Anniversary Issue. Order your copy now.

“I don’t really have any stories,” says Joe Bloom, while taking a bite out of a slice of pizza. It’s an eyebrow-raiser from the creator of perhaps the definitive storytelling platform of the vertical video generation, but he’s thinking of what he’d say if he went on the other side of the camera. ​“I don’t really find a need to tell anyone. Not that the stories aren’t overly interesting or anything, but I don’t know – I think I’d bug out.”

You’ve seen his creation. A person leans over a ledge, speaking into a bright red landline phone. As they talk and their stories unfurl, the camera slowly pans out and their place on a bridge comes into view. By the time the video reaches its conclusion, the person is just a tiny silhouette on the screen. Since the very first video was posted on the A View from a Bridge Instagram and TikTok accounts in February 2024, it’s amassed millions of views and likes, developed into a longform podcast, and been joined by cultural A‑listers from Cyntha Erivo to Ashley Walters.

Topics vary – from a palliative and end of life care nurse on the virtues of giving someone comfort in their final days, to a stage designer listing heartwarming facts about pigeons to challenge modern society’s ​“rats of the sky” stereotype – but more often than not they are led by deeply personal anecdotes. Wider societal topics are often breached, from racism to living with disabilities, or life after heartbreak. Ultimately, they are windows into the diverse smörgåsbord of experiences that is human existence.

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Though at first watch, the videos seem like short monologues, stories are actually drawn out over long conversations, with Bloom listening and guiding on the other end of the line. ​“The phone actually works,” he explains. ​“It’s a real phone call – a 45-minute conversation edited to a three-minute Instagram video.”

As with all viral content that circulates on social media, it’s easy to think that A View from a Bridge, and its success, sprouted largely from nowhere. But Bloom has been an artist almost all of his adult life, and to him, it’s just another part of his work. Born in 1995, he grew up in north London. Whereabouts? ​“Depends who I’m talking to, really,” he says. ​“To a magazine, I’ll go with Highgate. To the mortgage advisor, I’d say Archway. To friends, Tufnell Park. To someone who doesn’t know London, I’d say Parliament Hill, where the tennis courts are.”

As a child, he was ​“cheeky and rude”, but also ​“observant”. His mother is also a visual artist and used to teach classes in their house when he was growing up as a child. He’d loosely participate, but didn’t really take the idea of ever doing art seriously himself until he was around 13. First, he unwittingly drew a surprisingly good depiction of Bob Marley, then he went to a Lucian Freud exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, and grew fascinated by the painter’s lifestyle.

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“I remember reading about his life, and he wasn’t a particularly nice man,’” Bloom explains. ​“But I liked the idea that he could just paint his way through life, and no one was telling him what to do.”

Naturally, he went to art school and studied fine art. After graduating, he managed to make ends meet for a few years, but eventually grew tired of the art world’s cyclical trappings. ​“One painting used to take me a month, and if I was lucky, I’d sell that painting and be able to live for another few months off the back of it,” he recalls. ​“But it’s such a gamble. I love gambling, but don’t like gambling with my entire work. Like painting is probably the most stupid thing you can do with your time – it’s time consuming, expensive, and then someone will probably keep it privately, because they’re the only people who have enough money in the art market.”

His oil paintings are vivid, colourful and abstract, made up in totality of several tiny fragments. Zoom out and they warp perspective, centred by a central object that resembles almost a painting within a painting. Though on first glance they seem far removed from the vertical video format, Bloom sees similarities. ​“It’s funny, because the compositions of the paintings are not dissimilar from the composition of A View from a Bridge,” he explains. ​“In the way that it opens up to this central point of focus and there’s lots of noise around it. Really, the videos are essentially like if one of my paintings were to move.”

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The idea to start making videos first came a couple of years ago, and after trying out a few test shots, he headed with his friend Hannah Visocchi to the Millennium Bridge in Central London, armed with his camera, a microphone, a click-on microphone, a tripod, and the now-iconic red phone. They began asking around if people wanted to chat through the phone, and bar using different bridges for locations, the setup and process has remained the same since.

It was almost an instant success. A few videos in and the likes were in the tens of thousands, the views in the millions. Perfect social media fodder, the numbers would make it seem, but the idea itself came as a way of rebelling against mainstream forces. Since TikTok first emerged in the late-2010s, with YouTube and Instagram following suit with Shorts and Reels, shortform vertical video has been the dominant format for consuming content over the past few years.

Easy to scroll past, while being characterised by quick cuts, attention-grabbing hooks, and a rapid runtime, cheap dopamine hits had flooded feeds, but Bloom questioned whether there was another way. ​“I felt there was a gap for a storytelling show without a presenter, I’d got a bit sick of them,” Bloom explains. ​“Like sometimes the storytelling would be quite flashy, with this big hook or clickbait style headline, and the payoff was always shit. So I wanted something to make something with more generous storytelling, where you’re feeling less manipulated. And something longer than 45 seconds.”

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Instead of the quickfire, blink-and-you’ll miss them cuts, the conversation is drawn out over that single, long shot. Seems simple, and that’s because it is, but it’s a recipe that has got creative directors around the country searching for ways to replicate it themselves. ​“I think the main thing was thinking that, for success, there are all these trends that you’re meant to follow. But whoever made the first video that was 17 seconds and had a million cuts wasn’t thinking about what’s on trend,” he continues. ​“And look what has happened two years later. Everyone’s trying to replicate this kind of stuff – lo-fi, slower storytelling, no cutaways for the sake of attention. You make something good, and the attention comes.”

And in being filmed hundreds of metres away from the person on the bridge, while adding distance through using a phone to communicate, A View from a Bridge rejects the camera shoved in your face necessity that characterises so many POV street interviews. The ​“how much do you pay for rent in New York?” or ​“excuse me, sorry, are you two a couple by any chance?” videos that are so ever-present in our feeds.

Bloom reckons it’s part of what allows the people to tell their stories properly, raw and unfiltered. ​“There’s people opening up, and I can’t help but imagine them looking at the camera,” he explains. ​“Even Meet Cutes, I like them, but what’s the experience of staring at a camera and telling these parts about you? That self-awareness was something that I really wanted to strip away.”

The instant success saw interest from the wider cultural ecosystem, with PRs spotting opportunities to promote their clients’ upcoming press tours, while brands targeted its marketing potential. Bloom was hesitant to allow outside forces on the channel, believing that it would compromise the integrity of the storytelling, but it was ultimately Grian Chatten – the lead singer of Irish rock sensations Fontaines D.C. – who changed his mind.

Wearing an all-green tracksuit and a balaclava, he reflects on the world’s future, while describing the complicated path of holding hope in the modern day. ​“I read an article a couple of years back about us having reached the tipping point in terms of climate change,” Chatten says while looking over the Thames. ​“Ever since then, every bit of laughter and every kind of pleasantry feels like some bizarre fantasy that we are all forced to buy into.”

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And as the channel has grown, planting the red phone down on a bridge has become less of a mystery. It means that people increasingly want to feature on the videos – both a blessing, but in some ways, also a curse. ​“Nothing can beat the magic of plucking someone from the street,” he says. ​“Like even when a celeb says something you don’t expect, you can get a window into their head more, like maybe you’re saying this because of an album that focuses on these topics, or have a certain public image to maintain. But a stranger that doesn’t even know what the show is – they’re just saying it because they want to, without the context of knowing they will be listened to by millions of people.”

This urge to remain as grounded and authentic as possible has led to Bloom, along with his cast of friends who help produce the series, go further afield in search for them. One of the most memorable, and the one that jumps instantly to the show’s creators mind, came when he and producer Charlie Milner took a trip to Ilkeston – a small town in Derbyshire – and met three teenage boys walking down the canal path.

“There’s not much to do around here. This is the canal path, we come fishing sometimes, chill out here with a spliff on, catch a couple carp, eat snacks, sorted,” Owen opens, standing in the middle of a canal lock, flanked by his friends Harrison and Roy. ​“The youth clubs got all shut down and anything we try to do, what we like doing – riding motorbikes – we get taken off.”

What started off as a window into their daily activities quickly morphs into a study of life in small town England, austerity and the youth left behind by decades of neglect, as well as the importance of friendship. ​“It proved all the reasons why we started the show to be correct,” Bloom says. ​“Not knowing what the hell someone’s story is, but if you give them the chance to share, they will.”

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With A View From a Bridge’s platform exploding – at the time of writing it has 629,000 followers on Instagram – new opportunities have opened up for its creator. While Bloom has turned down opportunities for brand placements on the platform, he has instead helped to create content and adverts for organisations. He’s also maintained his wider filmmaking practice, including a soon-to-be released film about greyhound racing for the Museum of London, which he has directed, and his partner Molly Hackney has produced. ​“Working with Molly on the dogs and so many A View From A Bridge shoots over the past year has been amazing,” Bloom explains. Especially after a long day of shooting, being able to debrief and really talk about what we’ve listened to is an important part of the process. It’s great to be able to do with with someone I trust and love, and that stretches to all the people I work with.”

He feels a particular affinity with the dogs. ​“There’s actually an amazing community around greyhound racing. It’s one of these things where people are protesting it, but it’s no different to horse racing – it’s just for the working classes,” Bloom says. ​“And they are the only dog that has been the same genetically since the Egyptian times, because the rules on how they are bred have been so controlled. Cleopatra had a greyhound.”

Bloom is dressed in his great grandfather’s suit jacket, his girlfriend’s father’s shirt and his grandfather’s trousers. The latter was a regular at the dogs. ​“He used to wear it to the greyhound races and had a few good dogs. There was a big championship race at the old Wembley track, and his dog wasn’t really a winner,” he continues. ​“But when he got in the elevator, the boy operating it said, ​‘Mr Bloom, come and find me when your dog wins tonight and I’ll take you exactly where you need to go.’ My granddad said, ​‘How do you know? My dog’s not won anything.’ The bloke replied, ​‘Just trust me.’”

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Somewhat mystically, the elevator boy’s prophecy came true, and Bloom’s grandfather’s dog won. ​“He paid off his mortgage from that race. There are theories that my father-in-law rigged it and paid someone to feed all the other dogs minced meat to weigh them down – but he was Russian and couldn’t speak English, so I don’t know.”

So he does have stories after all. As A View from a Bridge shows, so do the people you walk past the next time you cross a bridge, or even pass in the street. As Marcus Mumford said on his recent episode: ​“Really, we’re all just walking stories.”

Maybe we should find the time to listen to them more. In our world of discourse, division and endless comment section ​“debates”, we should try to hear each other and find ways to connect, and ultimately, build bridges between us.

Isaac Muk is Huck’s digital editor. Follow him on Bluesky.

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