35 Amazing Vintage Photographs That Capture Street Life of London in the Late 19th Century

   

These incredible snapshots of life of Londoners were taken by photojournalist John Thomson from 1876 to 1877. The pictures of Dickensian poverty on the streets of London show the grim reality of life in Victorian Britain.

John Thomson was a talented and influential photographer, who had spent ten years traveling in, and taking photographs of, the Far East. On his return to London he joined with Adolphe Smith, a socialist journalist, in a project to photograph the street life of the London poor. The volumes were published in monthly parts as Street Life in London, and were an early example of social and documentary photography.

 
Photography on Clapham Common

 

 
The street locksmith

 

 
A convicts home

 

 
The dramatic shoe black

 

 
Convent garden labourers

 

The temperance sweep

 

 
Street Doctor

 

 
Street advertsing

 

Suffereres from the floods in Lambeth

 

Donkey for hire on Clapham Common

 

Workers on the "silent highway" (boatmen on Thames)

 

Dealer in fancy ware (jewelry, imitating gems and ornaments)

 

"Tickets", The Card Dealer

 

"Hookey Alf" of Whitechapel

 

Cheap fish of Giles's

 

London Cabmen

 

Mush-Fakers and ginger-beers

 

London Nomades

 

Covent Garden flower women

 

Public disinfectors

 

The independent shoe black

 

"Carey" the clown

 

The Crawlers

 

The flying dustmen

 

Black Jack

 

Cast-Iron Billy (a driver, holding whip)

 

The Water-Cart

 

The London Boardmen

 

An old clothes shop, Seven Dials

 

Italian street musicans

 

The wall-worker

 

The seller of shell-fish

 

Halfpenny Ices

 

November effigies

 

 
Recruiting Sergeants at Westminster