Peterborough Today

Inside the factories and out on the streets - actuality footage of Peterborough, captured by a cinema owner for screening locally alongside a main feature and other shorts.

It seems wherever the camera goes, curious faces appear. This is a great example of actuality footage in Peterborough. Captured everyday scenes of local people, who at a later date would have the opportunity to witness the spectacle of their on-screen self at the local picturehouse. The city's would-be paying cinema patrons smile obligingly as the publicity poster at 11:55 requests. This footage was discovered in a cupboard at Peterborough's Embassy Cinema in the 1970s.

Film includes, Baker Perkins factory, Westfield Road; City Picturehouse, owned by Jack Campbell; Fletton United (later Peterborough United) Football Club; Peterborough Laundry, Crawthorne Road; Bishops Road School; Peterborough Hockey Club. Actuality footage, is an early form of documentary film, like a still photograph … yet moving, and typically features everyday scenes of local people in their home town, produced specifically to be screened at a local picturehouse. Often produced by cinema exhibitors and shown in those same cinemas during the very early days of cinema exhibition, as part of a programme along with newsreel and fictional film, and at the time equally as popular as the ‘movies’.