North Shields Trams and Walking Race (c.1902)

Eager crowds watch the trams go by, while a boisterous children's walking race raises smiles all round.

It may not be the best-preserved film in the Mitchell and Kenyon collection, but this is certainly one of the liveliest - especially in the joyous walking race, when the camera plunges us right into the throng. The original negative was found in 1995 without any information about its date or origins. But the distinctive livery and other details of the trams in the first section points to the location being North Shields, which we know M&K visited at least once.

Thanks to Gwyn Lishman, whose sharp eye spotted the tram detail as characteristic of the North Shields fleet, and noted that this particular tram, number 1, appeared at the London Tram Exhibition in July 1902 - which would explain its clean and advert-free exterior. We can't be certain that the longer second section of the film, featuring the walking race and cheerful spectators in a park, wasn't shot in an entirely different location, but it's most likely that it was somewhere nearby. It's also possible that there were once further sections (especially of the tram sequence, which is unusually short), now lost.