Preston Street Scenes (1904)

Preston
1904
Silent

A glimpse of life on the streets of Edwardian Preston.

Horse-drawn trams are the centre of attention in this glimpse of a busy Preston street. A boy dashes fearlessly across in front of one such vehicle, while other travellers weave around the thoroughfare. These include a gent riding a horse, and numerous cyclists - one of whom, a priest, could be a dead ringer for GK Chesterton's fictional amateur detective Father Brown.

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.