London nomads

Photographed by John Thomson in 1876 as part of a series entitled 'Street Life in London.'

This particular photograph was taken on a piece of vacant land in Battersea and shows a friendly group gathered around a caravan belonging to one William Hampton. The woman seated on the steps, Mary Pratt ('old Mary Pradd') was murdered a few weeks after the photograph was taken. Thomson recalled in his book that 'The poor woman who met her end in so mysterious a manner had in life the look of being a decent, inoffensive creature. Clean and respectable in her dress, she might in her youth have been even of comely appearance, but now she wore the indelible stamp of a woman who had been dulled and deadened by a hard life.’