On a spring morning in 1912, a man with a tripod and a heavy camera walked out of Liverpool Street station and into the heart of London's East End, capturing the children playing with hoops and skipping ropes, the busy shoppers, the pubs, the horse-drawn delivery carts competing with lorries, the tailors promising individual garments at wholesale prices in an area famous for centuries for textile workers, a now vanished world. He then went home to his new photographic studio at Brightlingsea in Essex, and vanished from history.

His photographs of the streets and alleys of Spitalfields, which are going on public exhibition for the first time, are almost all that is known of CA Mathews: his studio is only known because the mounts of the photographs carry its address in tiny neat black ink letters. He took up photography in 1911, and within five years he died, soon after his wife, in late 1916. They may have been victims of the terrible epidemic of Spanish flu that killed more people than the first world war.

"What's interesting is what isn't in these photographs," said the photographer Jeremy Freedman, who has been restoring the fragile prints for three years, and scanning them to create large-scale copies in which details can be read, such as the artists performing that night at the Shoreditch Empire music hall.

"We think of this is area as the poorest of the poor, yet these people are not in rags. It's the Jewish sabbath, and only a few weeks after Passover, so they are in their best. On the whole they look well-fed and healthy. And in all the hundreds of people in these photographs there is just one little barefoot boy, standing at the edge of the children crowded into Frying Pan Alley."

The photographs were found a few years ago packed into a cardboard box in the archives of the Bishopsgate Institute where they had been for at least 60 years. Photograph: CA Mathew

Freedman lives in the heart of Spitalfields, as his Jewish family has for generations, and the exhibition is at the Eleven Spitalfields gallery, also the home and studio of the architect Chris Dyson, who has worked on many buildings in the surrounding streets. Many streetscapes are instantly familiar to both men – like the corner of Artillery Lane, where Dyson is about to begin restoration work on two houses – but others have been obliterated, including the grand houses in Spital Square. Some redeveloped since the photographer's day, such as the grand Fruit and Wool Exchange, are controversially facing demolition.

The photographs were found a few years ago packed into a cardboard box in the archives of the Bishopsgate Institute where they had evidently been for at least 60 years, but there are no records of how they came to be there.

The Gentle Author, creator of the award-winning Spitalfields Life blog, is on the case, but so far has discovered very little about CA Mathews, preferring instead an image of a gentle soul "in a shabby suit and bowler hat, with a threadbare tweed coat and muffler against the chill April wind", who missed a train, and filled in a few hours until the next one came.

Looking North on Norton Folgate towards Shoreditch High Street. Photograph: CA Matthews

There is another possible interpretation of the photographs. Mathews is clearly not particularly interested in the people, or worried whether they stand staring curiously at the camera, or move and become a blur of long skirts and swirling overcoat. He is more interested in the buildings. Almost all of the photographs include a derelict site, a building on the point of collapse propped with timber, or signs advertising space to let.

Most of the cardboard mounts are neatly labelled with measurements and dates – Wheeler Street is 23 ft wide, and the gap in the street has been there since No 88 was demolished in 1891, one records. It seems possible that Mathews was not a gentle potterer, but on a recce for a developer. Whatever happened, his work was never published and the war in which many of the people in the photographs must have died would have ended any grand development plans for the area.

Widegate Street looking towards Artillery Passage and the City. Photograph: CA Matthews

"I've been staring into the eyes of these people for the last three years as I've worked on the photographs and I feel I know them," Freedman said. "We would love to learn more about them – and somebody must know more about Mathews."

The gallery is open by appointment from Monday to Friday, and all day Saturday and Sunday, from 6 March -25 April