Scenes in Hull (1901)

Kingston upon Hull
1901
Silent
1m

A street scene in Edwardian Hull is dominated by advertising for an event to celebrate returning soldiers from the Boer War.

Several Mitchell and Kenyon films are oddly self-referential, capturing advertising for events where the films themselves would later be screened. These scenes flag up an event at Hull's Assembly Rooms, where Pringle's film show was running. The posters are manoeuvred around on a kind of giant mobile sandwich board, apparently promising audiences images of returning soldiers from the Boer War.

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.