The Yorkshire Film Archive collects, preserves, and shows film made in, or about Yorkshire. Our collections are non-fiction, dating from the 1890s to the present day, and providing a rich and visually compelling record of all aspects of lives, cultures, landscape, industries, major events and everyday activities, many of which are available to watch, free of charge, on our website.
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Pedestrians and Traffic
This engrossing film transports us back to a time when cars stopped for pedestrians and not the other way around, when the cars were British made and pedestrians held their ground.
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Overview
This spectacle of pedestrians going will-nilly across the busy city centre streets of Sheffield in 1950 may have been filmed for the purposes of traffic control, but, as the camera wanders hither and thither, it has given us a wonderful picture of the days of long grey coats, trilbies and headscarves. It was also a time of open backed lorries, trams and policemen in white coats directing all and sundry.
While in the throes of clearing up the hefty bomb damage from the war that had ended just five years previously, still in evidence in the film, the city council needed also to deal with the increased traffic. The need for traffic control was apparent. Despite the seeming casualness of the pedestrians displayed here, perhaps surprisingly, the fatality rate per vehicle mileage in 1950 was over 14 times what it was in 2007. Along with the increase in car ownership, petrol rationing ended in 1950, the Highway Code had yet to be introduced (in 1954), and there was a post-war surge of road safety films. The result is a quite different Fitzalan Square, Fargate and Church Street seen here from as they are today.
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