Back to collection "Culture, Customs, and Choirs"

Collection

How We Worked

Explore how yesterday's workplaces were recorded on video - and were infiltrated by it
From the late 19th century, the earliest film cameras captured thronging workers leaving their factories, their faces filling the frames of early films. Ever since, the moving image has had a close relationship with the workplaces where so many of us spend so much of our lives. As both screen technologies and the patterns of work evolved across the 20th century this relationship grew ever more varied and complex. Film itself played every possible working role in relation to all parts of the economy, the public and the private sectors, the factory and the office - observing and documenting, dramatising and satirising, training and campaigning. In the videotape era it became ever easier for cameras to film in workplaces - and for moving images to be shown there, via players and monitors. This collection explores the working worlds of the recent past, marked by economic and technological change, a world so close to our own and yet so far away.

23 videos in this collection

Watch in libraries only

The A-Z of Work Experience

  • Chorlton-cum-Hardy
  • 2002
Watch in libraries only

Stationery Objects

  • 1992
Watch in libraries only

National Minimum Wage: Journey

  • 1999
Watch in libraries only

IT82: The Home

  • 1982
Watch in libraries only

Working Hard - Nottingham Division

  • 1980
Watch in libraries only

A Day in the Life of a Hospital Pharmacist

  • Worthing
  • 1998
Watch in libraries only

Make Health Your Business

  • Manchester
  • 1996
Watch in libraries only

The Goldsmiths' Company Lecture: Vivienne Becker

  • 2004
Watch in libraries only

Station Assistance Support on the London Underground

  • Westminster
  • 2002
Watch in libraries only

Disability Discrimination Act: Act Now

  • 2004
Watch in libraries only

Two World Famous Things About Batley

  • Batley
  • 2001
Watch in libraries only

Work, Rest, and Play

  • Morley
  • 2006
Watch in libraries only

The Goldsmiths' Company: a Silversmithing Demonstration

  • 1990
Watch in libraries only

Firewoman

  • Bradford
  • 1989
Watch in libraries only

One Man and a Van

  • Manchester
  • 2006
Watch in libraries only

Employment Centres

  • Belfast
  • 1989
Watch in libraries only

Your Career in the Hotel and Catering Industry

  • Manchester
  • 1985
Watch in libraries only

Work in Progress

  • Sheffield
  • 2007
Watch in libraries only

Park, Co Derry

  • 2012
Watch in libraries only

Ballybay, Co Monaghan

  • 2012
Watch in libraries only

30 Years of UTV

  • Belfast
  • 1989
Watch in libraries only

Farming Ulster

  • Cultra
  • 1992
Watch in libraries only

Everybody Out

  • 1979