Darwen Street Scenes (1901)

Darwen
1901
Silent
2m

Young lads are out in force on the crowded streets in Edwardian Lancashire.

The first electric tram to Darwen, near Blackburn, ran in 1900. This film, shot the following year, shows a pair of them in the town's bustling centre weaving between a mass of people and other traffic, including a horse-drawn laundry van. The lads in the foreground grow livelier as the film progresses, jumping up and down enthusiastically - probably at the prompting of the filmmakers.

Street Life

Pavements thronging, traffic pressed nose to bumper (or tail): these astonishing films show Edwardian streets buzzing with life.

'Street scenes' were a staple of early filmmaking, and Mitchell & Kenyon's are particularly stunning, revealing in sharp detail how our ancestors behaved, dressed and moved in public, as well as how their towns and cities were organised.

These streets throng with human and other traffic. Motor cars were still a rarity, but the tide of vehicles never let up: horse-drawn carts, bicycles, omnibuses and trams (some of them electrified). They may miss the sounds and smells of the city, but these extraordinary images evoke a rapidly changing society: an urbanised, increasingly mobile, consumer Britain not so very different from our own.