The Singing Street

It was created 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.

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.

Most of the games revolve around the themes of love and death (courtship and bereavement), expressed in rhymes passed down the generations by word of mouth.

The film is subtitled A Merry-Ma Tanzie which is a traditional Scottish wedding game sung to the same tune as Here we go round the Mulberry Bush.

In the variation shown in the film (The Golden City) friends of the girl inside the circle quickly confide with each other to determine her intended sweetheart and name him in the song.

The 1950s were a time when the Edinburgh Corporation (town council) had designated many inner-city streets "children's play areas", requesting vehicle drivers to avoid them from the end of the school day until sunset.

[4] Also, as James Ritchie pointed out in the decade after the film, slum clearance soon transformed the surroundings in which most children grew up: "The tenement-factory conglomeration produced by accident a playing environment of exciting variety: and unless present-day architecture incorporates such ideas, it's dead from the start.

"[8]The US folk-song collector Alan Lomax made audio recordings of the Norton Park pupils during the first of his three field trips to Scotland in 1951, 1953 and 1957.

Lomax was a major inspiration behind the founding of the School of Scottish Studies at Edinburgh University in the same year the film was first shown.

[9] One scene, where a group of boys are singing on a flight of steps, features an onlooker wearing a hat and gloves and holding a walking stick.

As an avid collector of children's toys, he was the prime mover behind the creation of Edinburgh's Museum of Childhood which opened in 1955 and is now a major tourist attraction housed on the city's Royal Mile.