Whitehaven Street Scenes (c.1902)

Whitehaven
1902
Silent
2m

Lively scenes in Edwardian Cumbria.

The town in this particularly attractive film, originally one of our 'Edwardian Enigmas', has now been positively identified as Whitehaven, on the Cumbrian coast. The Anchor Vaults pub still stands on the corner of Queen Street and Market Place today. At one point a pair of showmen lark about with vegetables from a street grocer's stall, then hand out handbills advertising this film's screening.

Special thanks to John Addy and Michael Burdett for diligently working out the location from clues in the film.

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.