The Singing Street

The Singing Street, is a short film made in 1950 in Edinburgh, Scotland and first shown in 1951. It was made by a group of teachers from Norton Park School, who filmed some of their pupils playing street games, accompanied by traditional children’s songs, at various locations in the city. It documented an oral tradition which has all but vanished in the half century since it was made.

Norton Park was an inner-city Junior Secondary School (equivalent to a Secondary Modern School in England at the time). The old burgh boundary between Edinburgh and Leith runs through the school grounds. The building still stands beside the Easter Road football stadium of Hibernian F.C. but is now a business conference centre. At the time of filming the area was a more industrial environment than now with numerous industrial premises including two major printing works, a large engineering works, a timber merchant’s yard and a tobacco factory surrounded by tenement buildings built chiefly for artisans in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The songs were collected by James T R Ritchie, a science teacher at the school, assisted by his colleagues Nigel McIsaac and Raymond Townshend, both art teachers. McIsaac produced rough storyboard sketches and calculated timings to provide the shooting script. The camera was operated by William Geissler and Townsend. The songs were recorded subsequently, with no re-takes necessary, and 'dubbed' onto the film. According to the film’s production notes, the Scottish poet Norman McCaig supplied the whistling heard on the soundtrack. The 'Norton Park Group' then shot, cut and edited the film themselves, while taking advice from the Scottish Film Council, the British Film Institute and Campbell Harper Films.

The film was shot in monochrome and lasts 18 minutes. Its stated purpose was "to show how the singing games are played – in their natural setting. Beginning in the morning and ending with the dusk…"

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