Jamaica Street Glasgow (1901)

Glasgow
1901
Silent
2m

A flood of pedestrians and horse-drawn traffic in Edwardian Glasgow.

Jamaica Street was and still is one of Glasgow's busiest thoroughfares, and that's probably why Mitchell and Kenyon took their camera there in April 1901. Showman AD Thomas, who distributed this film, claimed that some 8,000 people saw it screened at the city's Grand Circus. Many of those will have been among the flood of workers in the concluding shot, apparently taken in another street.

The film illustrates a world in flux: many of the horse-drawn buses and carriages seen here would be replaced by electric trams a year later, in 1902. The traffic is almost nose-to-tail, but seems very orderly all the same.

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.