Tram Ride into Halifax (1902)

Halifax
1902
Silent
1m

A breathtaking winter journey in the Pennines, from country to town and back again via electric tram.

An unusually painterly visual sweep (taking landscape rather than people as its subject) distinguishes this particularly special Mitchell and Kenyon film. It proves thought-provoking as well as beautiful: expressing the changes to the face of Britain heralded by tram electrification and later accelerated by the internal combustion engine: the route travelled here is today a busy A-road.

In his celebrated 1934 travelogue An English Journey, author and thinker J.B. Priestley suggested there were "three Englands": the first a peaceful, ageless, pastoral land; the second a gritty, smoky one spawned by the Industrial Revolution; and the third an urban and suburban 20th-century England less rooted and romantic than either - and destined to supplant them both. Tram Ride in Halifax was filmed three decades earlier, yet it somehow encompasses all of Priestley's Englands, while revealing the crucial role of transport in connecting and transforming them all.

On the Move

Britain in the early 20th century was a society in a hurry - and transport was changing fast.

The era of mass transportation launched by the Victorians gathered pace in the Edwardian age. Mitchell & Kenyon’s films feature countless trains, buses and trams, as well as horse-drawn coaches and bicycles, though cars are still a rarity.

People where the duo’s stock-in-trade, but transport could also take a leading role. Films feature boats, ferries and ocean liners, but much more common - and frequently magical - are those which take us on a journey by train or, especially, by tram, gliding through space and time into the heart of the towns and cities of our ancestors.