One of the first films ever made is fifty seconds of workers walking out through a factory gate. Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, filmed by the Lumière brothers in 1895, shows exactly what the title says: a crowd of ordinary people finishing their shift and heading home. Nothing happens in it. Nobody involved thought they were making something people would still be watching a hundred and thirty years later. They were testing what their new machine could do, and a factory gate was simply what was in front of them.

The Lumières made a similar film soon after of a train pulling into a station at La Ciotat. There’s a well-worn story that the first audience panicked and fled, convinced the train was about to come off the screen. Historians have picked that story apart since and found no real evidence for it, so I’d treat it as a good story rather than a fact. What’s true either way is that people found it remarkable simply to watch a train arrive on a screen. An entirely ordinary moment, kept.

I spend a lot of time watching old footage like this, mostly on the BFI Player, which has an enormous archive of local and regional film organised by place. Some of what I watch sounds very dull on paper (and indeed much of it is on screen too) but there is something fascinating to me about this kind of footage, local archive material especially. One which will stick with me is a short Tyne Tees news item from 1968 called One Way System, Newcastle, about the new one-way traffic scheme being rolled out through the city centre. A reporter interviews baffled drivers. A local councillor drives him round the trouble spots. Nobody making it thought they were documenting anything except a traffic story for that evening’s bulletin. Watched now, it’s become a genuine record of a very specific moment: implementation of the sweeping replanning of the city that had begun a few years earlier under council leader T Dan Smith, who set out to remake Newcastle as what became known as the Brasília of the North, with raised pedestrian decks and walkways lifted clear of the traffic below. It was a genuinely ambitious, well-intentioned vision for the city, and none of that felt historic at the time. It was just the news.

My partner still brings up the time I sat through Manakamana, a documentary that never once leaves a cable car, a fixed camera bolted inside the cabin, filming pilgrims going up and down a mountain in Nepal to a temple, for the best part of two hours, nothing happening beyond people getting on and getting off again at the top. I thought it was fascinating. Many would disagree. But that’s just me.

I was walking along the Newcastle side of the river one afternoon when an LNER train came across from Gateshead, crossing the King Edward VII Bridge. I didn’t have anything on me except my phone, an iPhone 11 Pro at the time, so that’s what I used. Twenty-five seconds, handheld, done by the time the train had crossed. Nothing dramatic in it, just a train and a bridge under a grey sky, nothing that feels remarkable now. It will never be as famous or as watched as workers leaving a factory or the train entering the station, but it is captured. A moment of nothing that will one day be the distant past.

Filming Things That Don’t Feel Important Yet

Most of my landscape footage isn’t from a booked shoot. It’s from walking somewhere I already know and staying alert to what’s actually in front of me, rather than waiting for something that looks obviously worth filming. An LNER train crossing a bridge is about as unremarkable as North East scenery gets. That’s sort of the argument. The reporter in 1968 wasn’t trying to capture a vanished way of planning a city. He was filling two minutes of a regional news programme. The value came later, once the ordinary thing he’d filmed had quietly become a different world.

I don’t know which bits of what I film will matter in fifty years, and neither did anyone filming Newcastle’s roads in 1968. The safest approach is just not to be too quick to decide something’s too boring to bother with.

Why Overcast Light Works in Your Favour

The sky that day was flat and grey, the kind of light that can feel like a problem if you’re expecting drama. It isn’t. The iPhone 11 Pro’s extended dynamic range handled the scene well, holding detail in the pale sky and in the shadow underneath the bridge at the same time, which is exactly the kind of range that direct sun tends to lose. Bright sunlight forces a choice between the sky and the shadows. Overcast light doesn’t. You get the lattice girders, the stonework of the piers, the reflections on the water and the autumn colour in the trees behind, all held together without anything blowing out or disappearing into black.

It’s a small technical point, but it’s one I come back to often. The light that feels least cinematic on the day is frequently the light that gives you the most to work with afterwards.

A Bridge Built to Solve a Problem

The King Edward VII Bridge is easy to take for granted if you walk past it often enough, so it’s worth setting out what it’s actually doing there. Before it existed, trains reaching Newcastle Central Station from the south crossed the older High Level Bridge and then had to reverse out of the station in the direction they’d come, since there was no way through. The new bridge, built a few hundred yards upstream, solved that directly. Trains could enter and leave the station from either end.

It was designed by Charles A. Harrison, chief civil engineer of the North Eastern Railway, and built by the Cleveland Bridge and Engineering Company of Darlington, construction starting in 1902. The original plan was for two spans with land approach arches, until old coal workings were discovered under both ends of the site, forcing a redesign to four steel spans instead, resting on stone piers rather than the concrete sometimes assumed. That change meant the bridge could carry four tracks rather than two, and it’s often cited as the first railway bridge in the country to do so.

King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra formally opened it from a temporary platform at the Gateshead end on 10 July 1906, though the bridge wasn’t actually finished at the time. General traffic didn’t begin using it until 1 October that year. It’s Grade II listed, still carries the East Coast Main Line, and is sometimes described as Britain’s last great railway bridge, a title that feels about right when you’re standing underneath four tracks of lattice steel with a train running overhead.

What Gets Left Behind

This clip was never going to be a film on its own, and neither was Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory or a Tyne Tees report about road signs. None of them were made with half an eye on posterity. What they share is simpler: someone happened to have a camera pointed at something ordinary, and it survived.

Ordinary footage from around here now is exactly the kind of thing that tends to matter later. The Newcastle in that 1968 traffic film is gone in every way that counts, the confidence that raised walkways were the future most of all, and none of it was filmed to preserve any of that. It’s just what was there. I’d rather have too much footage of ordinary things around here than realise later I never bothered.

I’ve gone looking for that kind of vanished ordinariness on purpose too, checking a building’s real story against the version everyone repeats, in Filming First, Checking the Story Later: The Oxford Galleries, Newcastle.