After serving in World War II, Henderson studied at the Slade School of Art, where he met fellow artists Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton. He travelled with Paolozzi to Paris meeting with surrealists and artists such as Alberto Giacometti, Georges Braque and Fernand Léger.

His lifelong friendship with Paolozzi laid the foundations for the development of British Pop Art and the formation of The Independent Group, a gathering of artists and writers that met at the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) to discuss and disseminate new ideas about art practice. It was here in the mid-1950s that the term “pop art” was increasingly being used to describe a whole movement.

Henderson worked in a variety of media, especially photography and collage, experimenting with new techniques and processes. He also took numerous photos while he was living in Bethnal Green documenting how East End Londoners were coping with post war austerity on the streets. They show children playing, street vendors, market stalls, high streets, buildings and the street parties around the 1953 Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

In 1954 he moved with his family to a village in Essex along with the Paolozzis who owned joint cottages as their neighbours. With Paolozzi, Henderson established a company that produced wallpapers, textiles and ceramics. But this did not hinder his collaboration with others from the Independent Group and in 1956 they worked to deliver the seminal This Is Tomorrow exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery. He continued to produce Dada-influenced photo-montage images in his later work.

In 2012, the Nigel Henderson Estate appointed The Tate as the copyright agent for over 3,000 of his photographs taken from 1949 to1956. These cover his time in the East End and his interest in the 1950s Soho jazz scene featuring images of Tony Crombie, Ronnie Scott, Lennie Bush and Jack Parnell. You can buy prints of these at the Tate shop online here or his other artworks from mainstream galleries here.