Spitalfields Nippers

The Gentle Author of Spitalfields Life, the East End Culture blog, introduces Horace Warner’s Spitalfields Nippers, showing the photographs and giving the background to this astonishing set of images.

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

This unique collection of pictures revolutionises our view of Londoners at the end of the 19th century, by bringing us startlingly close and permitting us to look them in the eye.

Discovered recently and only seen by members of Warner’s family for more than a century, almost all of these breathtaking photographs are now published for the first time by Spitalfields Life Books.