Scenes at Piccadilly Circus and Hyde Park Corner Underground Stations

c.1931 | 3 mins (extract)

Who made the film (and exactly why) is obscure: a transport employee would seem the most likely bet. Whoever it was has left us with some captivating images of the tube. Generally much cleaner than it looks now and the underground shops at Piccadilly Circus look extremely smart. Unsurprisingly, the infrastructure in this film will look familiar to modern Londoners - it's the passengers who have changed: their dress, their body language, their racial mix, their sheer numbers and they can be seen smoking, cigarette in hand – something you certainly wouldn't see today. This artless series of unedited shots of people moving from A to B has taken on a strange, involuntary poetry over the decades.