Fascinating glimpse in to the Edwardian era

[LONDONER]

For those interested in history this is an interesting video very clevery enhanced with modern technology.

Looking at it I wonder how incredibly dirty and noisy the streets must have been in those days with the steel rimmed wheels on the cobbles and all the horse manure there must have been. How on earth did the women keep their clothes clean when the hems of their dresses must have dragged along the ground?

On a technical note I wonder how on earth they managed to shoot that travelling shot down the street. Surely it couldn't have been from the top of another horse drawn vehicle. Anyone got any ideas?

[Emiliano]

I dont know how I missed this. Thanks for posting this, the turn of the century is the most interesting time period for me. I'm so used to seeing shots of NYC from that time, its cool to see what London, I'm assuming, looked like.

In terms of how they got that shot, it must have been from one of the double decker buses. The film has clearly been edited to make it smoother, so that probably takes away any hint at the bumpiness from horses. Maybe it was sped up a little bit too?

Just a question - did London ever have elevated trains in the city? I know the Underground was the first in the world, and I'd assume that would kind of eliminate the need for elevated transit infrastructure, but Im just curious.

In terms of the noise - I'm sure it would have been deafening. I dont know if anyone has done something similar for other cities, but this is a site that has collected a lot of videos and audio on the topic of street noise from between 1900 and 1930. Its a really interesting to spend some time listening to.
http://vectorsdev.usc.edu/NYCsound/777b.html

In terms of the filth - those streets didn't look so bad. Again, I can only talk about my city, but I know that by the turn of the century over 2.5 million pounds of horse manure was being left on the streets of Manhattan every day by the over 200,000 transportation work horses that were the main power source for the city's early public transportation network. NYC also didn't have a very good department of sanitation yet, so (literally) tons of horse poop and trash just piled up in the poor neighborhoods of the lower east side. I was recently doing some research on immigration for my job, and a lot of immigrants reported you could smell NYC before you saw it.

At least in NYC, the filth of the city is what led to women's fashion changing and shorter skirts becoming more acceptable. Even by the 1870s NYC declared a health crisis because of the amount of manure and trash in the streets.







And I'll share this to relate to the video you posted. Theres also a lot of great videos in the site I linked to too.