Footage From Victorian England Enhanced to 4K and 60 fps

If, like me, you have a love for history, being able to see footage from Victorian England in 1901 is a real pleasure. Using neural networks, we can now see previously grainy and fuzzy video from the era upscaled to 4k, 60 fps, colorized, and significantly improved image quality.

Neural.love is a company that upscale videos using machine learning and neural networks. In simple terms, they take an old, poor quality video, and modernize it. We have featured some of their work before with a video of a train arriving at La Ciotat Station, France in 1896, as well as footage from New York in 1911. Honestly, I can't get enough of their work.

To see videos that looked to be all but lost to the caverns of time, resurrected and presented to us in a far more watchable format is fascinating. This video is a compilation of clips from 1900 and 1901 by Mitchell and Kenyon of laborers and passersby in the north of England. England's north has had a strong industrial core for some time and to see the level of detail was going missing is staggering. Many of the people passing the camera were equally drawn to it as I am to the footage, with cameras — particularly one that could record early video — being a rare sight. It's difficult to watch the video knowing that everybody, from children to adults, will have passed away even if at a ripe old age; something that can only recently be the case with video.

If you find it interesting, Shiryaev's channel has more to watch including videos we haven't covered.

Robert K Baggs's picture

Robert K Baggs is a professional portrait and commercial photographer, educator, and consultant from England. Robert has a First-Class degree in Philosophy and a Master's by Research. In 2015 Robert's work on plagiarism in photography was published as part of several universities' photography degree syllabuses.

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9 Comments

Here we are 13 years after Portal was released and apparently people still think it's cool to use the GLaDOS voice in their videos...

It's interesting to note that people in that era were more smartly dressed, even the youths, compared to some of us in modern time.

Depends how you define smart

Watched them all start to end, I'm not sure about smartly dressed, they are probably wearing every stich of clothing they own (apart from the French). Brilliant the way individual personalities begin to surface. I laughed when the kid got poked with an umbrella for being in frame at the boating lake (must be an old world videographers arrangement tool).

I love these films, I'm mesmerised by them. To think every single one of those people are now dead, probably in a cemetery near you. The young lads have the demeanour of old men. One thing about this particular video I'm not so sure about, they all appear to be wearing wooden clogs...that's a Danish thing

Its funny how kids over a 100 years ago acted the same way in front of a camera as our kids do now. Making faces, sticking tongues out, hand gestures haha. Pretty cool to see

Pretty cool. Enjoyed it.

Even the kids dressed fancy for just roaming around on the streets.

Towards the end of the video, there were those 2 fighting and everyone else just minded their own business walked passed them.

I noticed how few women were in the shots, mostly boys and men. Not very clean, some of them. Women had head coverings much like the "dreaded hijab." I turned off the sound, it was irritating.