Museums

Ragged School Museum

The largest of London's free schools for children too poor for any other, with its Victorian classroom kept.

A ragged school was a school for children who were too poor, too ragged, to be let into any other. Thomas Barnardo arrived from Dublin in 1866 meaning to train as a doctor and go to China as a missionary; a cholera epidemic that killed thousands in the East End changed his mind, and in 1867 he opened a ragged school instead.

These three buildings were warehouses, put up to hold goods coming along the Regent's Canal. Barnardo took them in 1877 and turned them into the largest ragged school in London, and for thirty-one years, until it closed in 1908, it taught tens of thousands of children their letters and their numbers for free.

The warehouses were nearly pulled down in the 1980s and were saved by people who lived here, who opened the museum in 1990 and restored it again in 2022. The classroom upstairs is set out as it was, rows of iron-framed desks facing a blackboard, and school parties are still taught a lesson in it by a teacher in role; the rest of the museum is about what living in this part of London was actually like while the school was open.

Where

46-50 Copperfield Road, E3 4RR

Nearest station

Limehouse · 9 min walk

Hours

NearbyMuseums

• London Museum Docklands19 min walk
• Chisenhale Gallery20 min walk
• Royal London Hospital Archives and Museum22 min walk

NearbyOther Categories

• Stepney City FarmWhat’s On7 min walk
• Tower Hamlets Cemetery ParkOutdoors & Nature10 min walk
• TroxyPerformance venues11 min walk

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