This fantastic 8mm Kodachrome amateur film of Leytonstone was shot in the same year as the photographs of the cyclists in Leyton (below) were taken – 1938. It’s tantalizing to imagine one of them is cycling past the camera at some point – or even that they knew the man who made this brilliant celluloid topographical record.

It’s interesting to see Harrow Green, little changed, the War Memorial to the dead of the First World War and soon to gain more names carved into the granite.

The Academy Cinema (0.36s), like all of Leytonstone’s cinemas, is sadly no more. They’re showing William Powell in Double Wedding and Conrad Nagal in Bank Alarm.  Waltham Forest now stands as the only London borough without a permanent cinema (the Leytonstone Pop-Up Cinema organises monthly screenings in the library).

The Police Station at 1.50 is boarded up now. Alfred Hitchcock was locked in the cells here as a young child at the behest of his father to teach him a lesson for some misdemeanor. It apparently left him psychologically scarred for the rest of his life – but I suppose, on the upside, he did turn that trauma into a lucrative career.

I’m going to watch it again to see if I can spot any of my Leyton cyclists. And a huge thank you to Mr S. Redburn for sharing his father’s film on Youtube.