Around 1900, photographer Horace Warner took a series of portraits of some of the poorest people in London – creating relaxed, intimate images that gave dignity to his subjects and producing great photography that is without comparison in his era.

Previously, only a handful of Warner’s sympathetic portraits of the children who lived in the courtyards off Quaker St – known as the Spitalfields Nippers – were believed to exist, but through some assiduous detective work by researcher Vicky Stewart and a stroke of good luck upon The Gentle Author, they were able to make contact with his grandson who keeps two albums comprising more than one hundred of his grandfather’s pictures of Spitalfields, from which the photographs published here are selected.
This unique collection of pictures revolutionises our view of Londoners at the end of the nineteenth century, by bringing them startlingly close and permitting us to look them in the eye.

Children Who Lived in Spitalfields, London at the Turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries

Children Who Lived in Spitalfields, London at the Turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries

Children Who Lived in Spitalfields, London at the Turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries

Children Who Lived in Spitalfields, London at the Turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries

(via Spitalfields Life)