Views of the Grand Parade, Cork (1902)

1902
Silent
2m

Views of St Patrick's Street and Grand Parade in Cork, awash with people and traffic.

The pedestrians are either engrossed by the camera or dodging traffic in this busy thoroughfare in Cork. St Patrick Street buzzes with electric trams, introduced to the city in 1898. From another viewpoint in Grand Parade the camera captures an array of vehicles and activities, including street sweepers, bicycles, a steam roller and an eye-catching strand-off between a donkey and a tram.

This film was commissioned by showman George Green for the Cork Exhibition in May 1902.

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.