Tram Ride into Halifax (1902)
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.
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Mitchell & Kenyon's Edwardian Britain
A miraculous journey around Britain at the dawn of the 20th Century, courtesy of filmmakers Mitchell and Kenyon.
Welcome to a lost world. These amazing films, lost for at least 80 years, offer something close to time travel. Miraculously discovered in a Blackburn basement in 1994, the films give us stunning images of ordinary life in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain.
The films' rediscovery rewrote the story of early film. Blackburn-based duo Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon, we now know, belonged to a thriving local, non-fiction filmmaking scene. Touring northern and central England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, they made films for fairground operators and other showmen to screen to paying audiences, offering punters the chance to 'see yourself as others see you'. Factory workers, churchgoers and schoolchildren, sportsmen and spectators - these relaxed Edwardians laugh, grin and point at the camera. Film brings them all back to life, as no painting or photograph ever could.
Digitisation of this collection was funded by The National Lottery.
8 videos in this collection
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Road to Restoration
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Burnley v Manchester United (1902)
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Panoramic View of the Morecambe Sea Front (1901)
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Loreburn School, Dumfries (c.1901)
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Tram Ride into Halifax (1902)
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Trip to Sunny Vale Gardens at Hipperholme (1901)
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