1-192-012 - © London Museum/Heritage-Images

The Mission Hall in Grundy Street, near East India Dock, London, 1900s. A group of children crowd outside the mission hall on the street corner. A board outside advertises a gospel service to be held that evening. 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.