Apr
5
Spitalfields Nippers: Horace Warner’s photographs of children in Spitafields in 1912
This set of 16 photographs is striking, mostly for me because for many of the images it is hard to credit that this is Edwardian and not Georgian London. Alan Turing was born in this year yet these images look a million miles away from the age of computing.
The context of the images is not known and they may have been taken to illustrate the problems of child poverty in the East End, but even if they are more constructed than we might like they provide a striking reminder of what the UK was like before the social reforms of the 20th Century.
