I'd never planned on becoming a collector. It began, as collecting interests do, quite by chance. Back in November of 2005, I quite literally stumbled over a shoebox at a flea market in Northern England's Colne, where I live in an old mill worker's cottage. There it was, beside a battered mannequin festooned with costume jewellery and a stack of scratched gramophone records: an old shoebox for size 9 brogues. Sticking out from under a table it was, thick red rubber band holding in the contents.

Nobody seemed to be in charge of the stall, there was no sign of a vendor. I looked around, almost guiltily, as if about to read someone else's mail.

B-doing b-dang went that rubber band as I removed it to discover a precious collection of daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, cartes-de-visite, cabinets and a plethora of 'real-photo' postcards. Some of the visuals were in raggedy envelopes; the majority were rubber-banded tight in categories that soon became apparent.

Faces of exquisitely dressed children, invariably posed with vintage toys, stared up at me from rumpled albumen paper prints and slivers of metal. Faces in prams and push-chairs, faces at church picnics and street parties. Faces glowing with joy, beside a sister, a brother, mother, father, family pet. Faces almost pleading to be rescued from the damp and dismal flea market. Scuffed, orphaned images - expressions from an age of innocence that genuinely touched my heart.

Many of the subjects in the pictures that ranged from 1870 to 1910 had been prettied up with a dusting of whitening powder in an attempt to acquire an essential brightness of tone to the pictures. Some of these one-of-a-kind images were produced on awkward reflective surfaces that needed to be held at a certain angle to be viewed. To my eyes all this was magical.

The greater part of these anonymous, cultural cast-offs was frozen in a time long before the invention of the automobile, telephone, washing machine or disposable nappy. Though many of the photographs were disfigured through years of wear and tear, those faces shone out in warm shades of grey and brown. Though the paper was often turned brittle, with corners missing, the figures of children long gone hovered there before me. Hair so neatly-combed. Skin all a-shine, radiantly fair. Clear, soft eyes, children so proud of their new big-buttoned coat, hat, toy or puppy dog. Babies with rattles, girls in decorative processions, boys in rough 'n' tumble teams. I wondered how long they had posed for the camera, the strategics of the sitting. Head braces were not infrequently used for a one-minute (or more) exposure.

With just one blink of an eye the single compelling possibility of ownership was pumping adrenalin fast. All around were voices bargaining, calling out the various prices of free range eggs and just-made jams.

I pretended to appear disinterested as I shuffled through a pack that was nothing but stained and dented studio shots of little girls upon hooked rugs with teddy bears, boys with seaside bucket 'n' spade against lavish backdrops. The colours they wore we can only guess at.

I looked through another pack: girls dressed in Sunday best with mother, boys with , the family dog. Little boys dressed as girls, as once they were until a certain age. Little girls dressed as sailors, excited by the fancy dress.

What these images had in common was that they were heart-warming visuals, pictures of another time, another world - long before Play Station and the perils of modern society. All became mine for a mere ten pounds. An absolute bargain!

Back home, images spread over the kitchen table; expressions of affection and love moved me. Mothers and fathers with their young ones: intimate, tender, protective bonds. All the care and affectionate details of a special family moment: the occasion of a magical photographic session.

Click, a photo taken. Hello, look at us. Here we are, together. You may ask yourself, where was this photograph taken? And why? Who were they? What kind of life did they lead? Unidentified people in unspecified places at unspecified times, captured by anonymous photographers. Unknown sitters: intriguing. Disconnected, discarded. No longer in frames or albums that once cherished them, no longer within carefully hand-written letters that went through a slow postal system.

Experts on teddy bears or hair or shoe styles may be able to pinpoint exact years, but so much about vintage photography is elusive, a seductive mystery. From christening finery to the teen dressed as a miniature adult, many subjects were in the photographer's studio because an appointment had been made. This attendance gave the pictures an often clinical formality: from First Communion card to Boy Scout snap while the uniform was still pristine. Once upon a time, photography was for an elite, then the picture postcard craze crashed that, with travelling photographers coming a-knocking and studios springing up in every town and along many a seaside promenade.

The studio became a stage for three-dimensional wish fulfilment and on that stage aspirations and fantasies were played out in hired outfits against painted backdrops, classical pillars, voluptuous velvet drapes. Many children indulged their wildest fantasies with theatrical costumes and props in early, makeshift photographic studios. Subjects dressed as gun-toting cowboys, 'gents' in top hats 'n' tails, as pierrots.

Most of the subjects in this shoebox of discovered treasure were documented in the form of 'real-photo' black and white picture postcards, a format so popular at the start of the twentieth century. Brothers, sisters, families, whatever the relationships or our interpretation of them, someone somewhere had spent a lot of time and maybe money putting together this abandoned collection which had crossed my path. It was a collection that I soon began to expand. With visits to flea markets and regular purchases at specialist photographic fairs, successful bids made on e-bay, the various categories began to swell.

I placed a series of adverts in the monthly publication Picture Postcard Monthly and suddenly I was inundated by well-wishing card collectors and businesslike dealers who sent me pack after pack of visuals on approval. One piece of correspondence was sent by one Agnes Graham from Longfield in Kent, who sent her personal collection with a note reading thus:

As a midwife and paediatric nurse, I collected items relating to childhood for many years. Age and infirmity cause me to dispose of my interest.

Having worked for many years as a teacher, my aim was to put together a book about the world of childhood from another time that would enthuse parents with the simple things from the past to delight their children. A book about how children with names that seem so archaic to us now, used to play, what made them smile, what aided healthy development. All those long-forgotten skipping games, songs they thrilled to. All those discarded recipes for pies and sauces and essential jellies. Sweets with often bizarre names, toys that came and went with fads. Toys that didn’t need expensive batteries or microchips!

In 1888, George Eastman introduced the Kodak camera that came loaded from the factory with enough film to take one hundred pictures. These cameras needed to be returned to Kodak to be processed and reloaded with more black and white film. A craze began, similar to mobile telephone mania.

Picture postcards were available on the Continent in the mid to late 1860s. In the UK, regulations allowed the Post Office to produce its own plain 'postcard' with printed stamp but these did not include a picture. Eventually, after much lobbying, the Picture Postcard was licensed by the Post Office in 1894 and in 1902 the divided back postcard that we recognise today, with both message and address on one side, was allowed.

Kodak recognised the potential of the 'real-photo' postcard and began to delight amateur photographers by printing their negatives in this way. In the years leading up to World War 1, sending and collecting postcards was an international craze that captured the imagination right up to 1940. Sometimes, on the back of an image, there's a telling communication, hastily written and provocatively. Sometimes an interesting postmark decorating the back of a card. More often blank, nothing. Anonymous.

As a child I was raised in my parent's old people's home in Ealing, West London. Heywood House was a business both owned and managed by my resourceful mother. It was a home for two dozen ladies and gents. Each room was a different world. Each individual had one thing in common: they all came to their final stop in Madeley Road, London W5, with a photo album amongst their collection of prized possessions. How they loved to tell stories to my three sisters and I.

Some of the photo albums I viewed as a ‘tot’ in the early 60s contained images of these elderly residents as children: smiling sisters side by side; brothers together in fresh school uniforms, all serious at a family wedding - father in a stiff and irritating collar, mother all corseted tightly. It was as a child that my interest in social history began. Perhaps it was those albums, all those anecdotes, which later steered me towards being a photographer and writer.

I loved those large, thick, heavy albums; the various formats of photographic image, from elaborate studio backdrops to the various stamps of the photographer's name and address. I was always impressed by the delicate images; those, which needed to be kept under, glass in hinged cases, lined with worn-thin satin or velvet. The photographs collected here were intended to be treasured by those they were made for, a small circle of family and friends. Maybe kept for years in rosewood desks with brass-edged corners and mother-of-pearl inlays, they became photographs that got passed on, then passed over, thrown out. Had it not been for my special childhood, I might have left that shoebox at Colne’s Saturday flea market in the rain. It’s a good thing I didn’t. These are photographs that precious pennies were spent upon. There’s so much that parents, carers and educators can learn from these images from another time, another world of childhood.