Welcome to a lost world. These amazing films, lost for at least 80 years, offer something close to time travel. Miraculously discovered in a Blackburn basement in 1994, the films give us stunning images of ordinary life in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain. 

The films' rediscovery rewrote the story of early film. Blackburn-based duo Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon, we now know, belonged to a thriving local, non-fiction filmmaking scene. Touring northern and central England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, they made films for fairground operators and other showmen to screen to paying audiences, offering punters the chance to 'see yourself as others see you'. Factory workers, churchgoers and schoolchildren, sportsmen and spectators - these relaxed Edwardians laugh, grin and point at the camera. Film brings them all back to life, as no painting or photograph ever could. 

Digitisation of this collection was funded by The National Lottery.