Factory to Home and Pinner Rd

From the collection of

London’s Screen Archives is a network of over 50 organisations with a collective vision – to preserve and share London’s history on film. The network is managed by Film London and we work with our partners to digitise, preserve, and offer access to their moving image collections.

Factory to Home and Pinner Rd

London’s Screen Archives
Pinner
1926
Silent
12m

Evocative film capturing the suburb of Pinner succumbing to modernity, as we watch roads being constructed and the countryside retreating.

This fine film shows John Betjeman's Metroland in the process of its construction, as we watch a road and houses slowly appear in the formerly rural suburb of Pinner. This is the onset of suburbanisation, and the cameras show how the area's rural nature – there are several shots from farms and fields – succumbs to inevitable suburbanisation, with cars and buses replace horses and carts on freshly tarmacked streets. A huge change, carefully chronicled.

Film of the journey home from work [the Harrow Kodak factory], to Pinner. Street scene footage.

Pioneers of Personal Film

At the dawn of the cinema age, these trailblazing early adopters brought filmmaking technology into the home.

Home moviemaking is older than the first cinemas: we've been filming ourselves for well over a hundred years. The birth of the cinematograph in 1895 inspired a plethora of inventions pitched at the domestic market: Kinoras, Kammatographs, Pictorialographs, Birtacs and Biokams - all cameras designed for amateurs and enthusiasts to film and project in the home. This collection celebrates the earliest home movies preserved in Britain, and bears witness to the dawn of the amateur's long-standing fascination with family, travel and community. "The object in introducing this apparatus is to endeavour to popularize this extremely fascinating branch of photography.... [I have] always looked forward to the time when animated photography would be within the reach of every one" - filmmaker/inventor Birt Acres, on his Birtac camera, 1898.