The Ragged School Museum is a museum in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. The museum was opened in 1990, in the premises of the former Dr Barnardo's Copperfield Road Ragged School. The school opened in 1877 to serve the children of Mile End with a basic education. It closed in 1908, when the London School Boards were sufficiently established to take over the work.
The museum is housed in three canal side warehouses at 46-50 Copperfield Road. The buildings were saved from demolition in the 1980s by local residents, and a trust set up to manage the property in 1990. The museum seeks to record the establishment of the London Ragged School Union, in 1844; and to recreate the experience of how Victorian children would be taught.
The museum features a reconstructed Victorian classroom, and a typical East End kitchen from 1900. Gallery areas also introduce local and cultural history of the East End.
The buildings face Mile End Park.
Famous quotes containing the words ragged, school and/or museum:
“At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth
Of thieves and murderers: there I him espied
Who straight, Your suit is granted,said, and died.”
—George Herbert (1593–1633)
“We have passed the time of ... the laisser-faire [sic] school which believes that the government ought to do nothing but run a police force.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“When I go into a museum and see the mummies wrapped in their linen bandages, I see that the lives of men began to need reform as long ago as when they walked the earth. I come out into the streets, and meet men who declare that the time is near at hand for the redemption of the race. But as men lived in Thebes, so do they live in Dunstable today.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)