to run the business until he retired in 1960. Discovery and restoration of the Collection In 1994 during demolition work in what had been Mercers toy shop in Northgate, Blackburn, two workmen were clearing out the basement when they found three metal drums like milk churns, and looked inside to see hundreds of small spools of film. On their way to the Lethbridges Scrap Metal Processors was Magic Moments Video which did cine to video transfers, and the workmen dragged in a churn and asked the proprietor, Nigel Garth Gregory, if the films were of any value. Knowing of local businessman and historian Peter Worden's interest in cinematography, Gregory phoned Worden and offered to arrange for the drums to be delivered to him. Following delivery Worden examined the rolls and realised that the film stock was highly volatile and stored the rolls in a chest freezer in his garage until their transfer to the British Film Institute in July 2000. A large cache of Mitchell & Kenyon negative and positive films and a Norden cinematographic camera was offered by Christie's South Kensington on 23 November 1997. A second group of five 35 mm negatives was sold by the same auction house on 20 February 1997. The film titles sold in the initial lot are listed in the reference. Worden, along with another local historian, Robin Whalley, researched the films and provided an invaluable introduction to the firm and their films in an article published as "Forgotten Firm" in Film History, volume 10, no. 1, 1998 (). The Peter Worden Collection of Mitchell & Kenyon Films has now been preserved by staff at the British Film Institute's National Film and Television Archive, carefully storing the dangerously flammable 35 mm nitrate negatives in rooms that are constructed with water tanks suspended above a glass ceiling so that if the stock should ignite, the resulting fire will cause the glass ceiling to fail and enable the suspended tanks of water to extinguish the fire. Painstaking film preservation techniques were used to produce remarkably clean and scratch-free positives, adjusting the speed to smooth out the variations in these hand-cranked films. The results are fresh and natural, offering an unparalleled social record of early 20th century British life. The University of Sheffield's National Fairground Archive and the British Film Institute were awarded a three-year research grant by the Arts and Humanities Research Board to research,