While Hoppé’s earliest photographs were portraits made in his London studios, from about 1907 onwards he was increasingly active photographing the city that became his home. Hoppé’s documentation of London may be compared to that of Eugene Atget’s work on Paris—as both worked systematically over several decades to chronicle the landmarks and architectural fabric that made up the topography of these historic cities.

Hoppé’s earliest books on London show portraits of its literary figures and London street “types”—ersatz typological studies of the urban characters that populate the contemporaneous writing of Hoppé’s sitters such as Thomas Hardy and George Bernard Shaw.

In 1926 Hoppé published three books, including London Types: Taken from Life, a small volume of street characters, Forty London Statues and Public Monuments, a study of public art in the Empire tradition, and Picturesque Great Britain: The Architecture and the Landscape, which includes a few of his topographical views of London amongst the views of most regions in the British Isles. Various other small books on London followed: The Image of London, 1935, A Camera on Unknown London, 1936, The London of George VI, 1937, and Rural London in Pictures, 1951. It was very likely that the war prevented Hoppé from making the comprehensive, large-format photographic book on London that his formidable body of work on the subject would have allowed.

The photographs in this gallery are selected from Hoppé’s many books on London but focus on those decades of his most prolific work, the 1920s and 1930s.