Warning! You may find britishpathe.com addictive.
Just browse their archive of film from the 1896 to the 1970s by hitting the “Lucky dip” button.
I’ve just been looking at images of Brighton’s West Pier from 1933. The preview of the clip gives you
some descriptive text, but to actually view the movie you need to fill out a form and then download
the (Windows) media file. The very low quality preview is free (oddly they email you an invoice)
and has a seriously annoying “(c) BRITISH PATHE PREVIEW ONLY” banner stuck 2/3 of the way down the screen for the whole movie.
Still, you can splash
out and buy the high-quality version if you really wanted to.
Promisied for spring this year: 12 million still images.