Workpeople and Girls on Stoney Street, Nottingham (1900)

Nottingham
1900
Silent
1m

Edwardian laceworkers hasten home at dinner time.

This is one of Mitchell & Kenyon's earlier 'factory gate' films, and is shot from an unusually high camera position. As workers from the nearby lace factory, Thos. Adams and Co, walk towards and past the camera, they peer upwards as if trying to see what is going on. The film was shown in October 1900, as part of an exhibit of ' Electric Living Pictures' at the Goose Fair in the Old Market Square.

Crowds of people in front of the camera in Stoney Street, Nottingham

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.