Step back to summer 1924 as Oxford crowds gather on college barges to watch the Thames Regatta—one of the earliest films of the city, captured for Albert Kahn’s visionary Archives of the Planet project.
Oxford Thames Regatta 1924: Archives of the Planet
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Experience Oxford in the summer of 1924 through one of the city’s earliest surviving films. Shot on 35mm by French filmmakers Roger Dumas and Camille Sauvageot, this remarkable footage captures the bustling crowds lining the Thames, cheering from the grand Oxford college barges as students race past in the heat of a perfect summer’s day.
From May to July 1924, the filmmakers were commissioned by French philanthropist Albert Kahn for his groundbreaking Archives of the Planet project—an ambitious global effort begun in 1912 to document human life, cultures, and landscapes before they disappeared.
Kahn’s extraordinary archive ultimately amassed 183,000 metres of film, 72,000 autochrome colour photographs, and 4,000 black-and-white images. This rare Oxford regatta footage survives today thanks to the Albert Kahn Collection and is shared here under their CC-BY-4.0 licence.
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In this series we seek to rediscover film footage of Oxford’s past and make it available for public viewing. How has Oxford changed? How has it remained the same? What important events have happened at Oxford University? Each episode in the series makes use of archive films to explore when, where and how the films were taken, and what they can tell us about the history of the University, the city of Dreaming Spires and the surrounding Oxfordshire countryside. The series will include films...
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