Edwardian London Comes to Life (Amazing Movie footage from 1904)

Powerline ^ | 10/24/2008 | John Hinderaker

[retrokitten]

Very, very cool! Thanks for posting!

I’d love to see the entire 12 minute film.

[VR-21]

Thanks for a post that neither depressed or enraged me. I loved the train on the overpass at the end.

[HuntsvilleTxVeteran]

“I'd love to see the entire 12 minutes”
I agree!

This clip is only 1.04 minutes.

[ladyvet]

Thank you for posting this! Very cool, where do you get to see the rest?

[Brett66]

Bump for after-work viewing.

[andy58-in-nh]

What a wonderful glimpse into a very different life and time. The sight of a train chugging and steaming through the bustling city on its elevated platform was quite remarkable.

[kalee]

Thanks for posting this. I wish it were longer.

[Kimmers]

Wow this is great !!!!! thanks for the post... I forwarded it to a friend of mine that grew up in London.....he is a citizen here and has no desire to live there again....

[null and void]

I must confess the stress and danger of the time have left
an abiding sense of doubt and insecurity in my mind. I sit
in my study writing by lamplight, and suddenly I see again
the healing valley below set with writhing flames, and feel
the house behind and about me empty and desolate. I go
out into the Byfleet Road, and vehicles pass me, a butcher
boy in a cart, a cabful of visitors, a workman on a bicycle,
children going to school, and suddenly they become vague
and unreal, and I hurry again with the artilleryman through
the hot, brooding silence. Of a night I see the black powder
darkening the silent streets, and the contorted bodies
shrouded in that layer; they rise upon me tattered and
dog-bitten. They gibber and grow fiercer, paler, uglier, mad
distortions of humanity at last, and I wake, cold and wretched,
in the darkness of the night.

I go to London and see the busy multitudes in Fleet
Street and the Strand, and it comes across my mind that
they are but the ghosts of the past, haunting the streets that
I have seen silent and wretched, going to and fro, phan-
tasms in a dead city, the mockery of life in a galvanised
body. And strange, too, it is to stand on Primrose Hill, as
I did but a day before writing this last chapter, to see the
great province of houses, dim and blue through the haze
of the smoke and mist, vanishing at last into the vague
lower sky, to see the people walking to and fro among the
flower beds on the hill, to see the sight-seers about the Mar-
tian machine that stands there still, to hear the tumult of
playing children, and to recall the time when I saw it all
bright and clear-cut, hard and silent, under the dawn of
that last great day. . . .

[surfer]

Thanks for sharing...that was very cool...

[Oshkalaboomboom]

bfl

[chimera]

Amazing quality. Not grainy at all like a lot of old films tend to be. Note at the end on the bridge in the distance there appears to be some kind of urban commuter train going across being pushed backward by the engine at the end of the train. Not something you see every day.

[ExpatGator]

Bloody cool!

[Sans-Culotte]

Dittoes on the bump for later.

[r9etb]

Cool! I often wonder what it would be like to live in a city where all of the horse power is fueled by oats.

Stinky, apparently, and extremely unhealthy due to the huge tonnage of "tailpipe emissions" that either washed around in the rain; or turned to dust and blew into the lungs when it was dry.

I've heard it said that one happy side-effect of the internal combustion engine was that resulted in a tremendous improvement in public health....

[KayEyeDoubleDee]

Take a break from election overload

I wonder how many of the little boys playing in the water would die at Flanders.

Or how many of the little girls in the dance would die during the Blitz?

...Of the battles, the largest, best-known, and most costly in human suffering was the Third Battle of Ypres (21 July to 6 November 1917, also known as the Battle of Passchendaele) in which the British, Canadians, ANZAC and French forces recaptured the Passchendaele ridge east of the city at a terrible cost of lives. After months of fighting, this battle resulted in nearly half a million casualties to all sides, and only several miles of ground won by Allied forces. The town was all but obliterated by the artillery fire...

...By the end of May 1941, over 43,000 civilians, half of them in London, had been killed by bombing and more than a million houses destroyed or damaged in London alone...

[al_c]

I see the traffic hasn’t changed in 108 years. LOL!

Excellent find ... very rare.

[Joe 6-pack]

Cool. By chance I stumbled upon this on YouTube a week ago or so. It's an Edison cylinder recording of the poet, Robert Browning from 1889.

[aruanan]

Thank you for posting this! Very cool, where do you get to see the rest?

I think he found just a fragment of it.