Then and now…
Filmmaker Simon Smith has come up with a clever way to show how much (or little) London has changed over the last century.
In the 1920s, Claude Friese-Greene filmed his travels around Great Britain for a project called The Open Road. He used a film coloring process based on the one his father developed, exposing black and white film through color filters. Claude’s project still captivates viewers today; the British Film Institute eventually restored and re-released it for a 21st century audience.
The London portion of The Open Road inspired Smith to make his own, matching version. In his six-month project, titled London In 1927 and 2013, Smith re-shot each of the scenes Friese-Greene documented 86 years prior. He then lined it up with the 1927 footage for comparison…
email readers click here for Smith’s film
Read more at “London, Then and Now (1927 to 2013)”; and see Friese-Greene’s The Open Road here.
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As we redouble our efforts to master The Knowledge, we might recall that it was on this date in 1915 that Great Yarmouth became the first British town attacked from the air in WWI, when two German zeppelins (which had intended to attack Hull, but gone astray) dropped bombs on the Norfolk port. Zeppelin attacks continued and soon reached London… “shaping” the urban landscape that Friese-Greene captured just over a decade later.
The aftermath of a zeppelin bombing in London. 1915