Look at these two films of London. The first from 1903, the second from 1913. What changes do you you notice?
What happenned to all the horses?
Did you notice how almost everyone is wearing a hat? By 1927 there were a few hatless men.
In 2008 practically none.
31 January 2011
London changes through the years
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Two things I notice about 1903: pedestrians intermingled with carriages and wagons as part of the normal traffic. Clearly the slower pace of horse-drawn vehicles posed less of a danger to those on foot than motorized vehicles would a mere ten years later. It is utterly amazing that only ten years brought such a transformation from the horse-drawn carriage to the horseless carriage. This must have been a time of relative affluence.
The other aspect of 1903 city life I notice, in some shots, is the piles of horse manure throughout the street. Perhaps that alone was cause enough to move to motorized vehicles, replacing one substantive form of exhaust for another more ephemeral one.
Thank you for sharing these wonderful old films. I was amazed at how busy the rush hour traffic was in 1903. I noticed that there were very few women in the footage filmed in the City - a few on top of the omnibuses but none as pedestrians. The 1913 "riot" seemed incredibly peaceful and decorous by today's standards. There were still quite a few horse drawn vehicles on London Bridge in the 1927 film.
Post a Comment