Davis Family Films: USA – Lord Mayor's Show, Blackfriars (1963)

Soldiers, zebras, mock Tudor Ferris wheels and men dressed as trees feature in this sharply edited home movie of the 1963 Lord Mayor’s Show in the City of London.

This home movie by Haringey’s Davis family in 1963 includes three minutes of splendid film from the 1963 Lord Mayor’s Show in the City. The footage starts at 3min 3sec outside the Blackfriars pub. Shown passing are soldiers, sailors and marching bands, including the 254th City of London regiment, the City of London Field Ambulance and University of London officers training corps. They are followed by snappily edited film of some truly weird and wonderful floats.

It starts with a reunion at an airport and includes shot in a park but the best parts focus on the 1963 Lord Mayor’s Show, organised by the London’s Master Builders’ Association on a theme of housing. There’s a float in the form a pyramid spelling the word BUILDING, a lime-green bulldozer boasting of “4 million new post war homes”, men pushing wheelbarrows, people dressed as a tree stump, phone box and zebra carrying a beacon. There are dinosaurs, the Three Little Pigs, a concrete elephant (now located in Camberley, Surrey), a Ferris wheel with mock Tudor house pods, an igloo, a house covered in scallops and a float carrying scantily clad women inside a marquee marked ‘air conditioning’. Bruce Castle Museum