Liverpool Street Scenes (1901)

Liverpool
1901
Silent
1m

Traffic and pedestrians - including an early motor car - in Edwardian Liverpool.

Seen from the city's 'Holy Corner', Liverpool is a hive of people and traffic: in the early 1900s much trade was conducted on the streets. Liverpool had become a wealthy city, and the shop fronts are filled with items for sale. Unusually, we see a motor car, a potent symbol of prosperity. One of the passengers may be Sagar Mitchell - half of filmmaking duo Mitchell and Kenyon.

Two rolls of film were used to make up this one film and it would have proved of great interest to local people, many of whom will have paid between sixpence and a hefty two shillings in the hope of catching a glimpse of themselves on screen. The film would also have been seen as great advertising for the vehicle and its seller, and for all the shops featured.

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.