The oldest known documentary footage of London will be shown in Britain for the first time in more than a century at a free outdoor event in Trafalgar Square tonight.

Living London, shot by the American film-making pioneer Charles Urban in 1904, was believed to have been lost until a British academic discovered an unlabelled print in an Australian archive.

About a quarter of the original hour-long film survives, including footage of ferries on the Thames and horse-drawn buses plastered with advertisements.

Living London introduces London Loves, an evening of 15 rarely seen short films showing as part of The TimesBFI 52nd London Film Festival.

The only footage of London that survives from before 1904 is very brief single shot clips, for example of people crossing Blackfriars Bridge.

Ian Christie, Professor of Film History at Birkbeck College, University of London, found the film at the Australian National Film and Sound Archive in 2006. “I thought it was amazing to look at but didn’t know what it was. Then I noticed a plug for Charles Urban’s next film – sandwichboard men walking across the screen advertising A Trip to New York.”

Luke McKernan, an Urban scholar, confirmed that the footage was shot by the man seen as one of the fathers of documentary film-making. Urban, a travelling salesman from Ohio, moved to Britain in 1897, the year after the first commercially successful motion picture. He developed the concept of the feature documentary and the first commercial colour film process.

Professor Christie said: “ Living London is a fantastic documentary, but it is also a contribution to the history of London.”

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