1-192-009 - © London Museum/Heritage-Images

Little Collingwood Street, Bethnal Green, London, 1900s. Residents of the street pose for the photographer. Two of the boys in the front of the picture are barefoot. A little girl stands on the left, with a dog sitting in the begging position. Galt came to London in 1890 to work as a missionary for the London City Mission. In the early 1900s he took a series of photographs, mainly of the East End, which he had made into lantern slides to illustrate lectures publicising the work of the Mission. Galt sought to show that though there was great poverty in the East End, the people were not sub-human, as was popularly imagined by the middle-classes, but ordinary folk trying to do their best under difficult circumstances.