Here’s a 1951 love letter to the city of Detroit from the Ford Motor Company in the form of a seven-minute color film.

If you want to understand the U.S. auto industry, you need to understand the city of Detroit, too. The histories of the two are completely intertwined. How Detroit came to be the Motor City is a story in itself (Historian Don LaCombe of the Ford Piquette Plant offers an excellent explanation we’ve featured here) and while the area has been home to numerous industries throughout its history, for most of the 20th century it was dominated by auto manufacturing.

It’s interesting to note now, in hindsight, that this film was produced in 1951. While Ford couldn’t have known it at the time, Detroit was actually at its peak in population at around 1.85 million. White Flight and the great migration to the suburbs were already under way. And as the old auto factories in the heart of Detroit were shut down and replaced by newer plants beyond the city limits, the jobs and the workers moved on, too. By 1970 the city’s population had slipped to around 1.5 million, then to around 1 million by 1990. Roughly 650,000 people called Detroit their home in 2020, roughly one-third of the 1950-51 peak. The decline of Detroit has been a much longer process than people recognize, and in large part its fate has been tied to the twists and turns of the U.S. auto industy.

The film, which comes to us courtesty of Ford Heritage at the National Motor Museum in the UK, celebrates the city and the auto industry at the peak of their glories, and offers a nice synopsis of the city’s history before the auto industry as well. There’s a lot of great history and lore packed into seven minutes—enjoy.