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:
“The theatre is the best way of showing the gap between what is said and what is seen to be done, and that is why, ragged and gap-toothed as it is, it has still a far healthier potential than some poorer, abandoned arts.”
—David Hare (b. 1947)
“The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But youd never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1953)
“The Museum is not meant either for the wanderer to see by accident or for the pilgrim to see with awe. It is meant for the mere slave of a routine of self-education to stuff himself with every sort of incongruous intellectual food in one indigestible meal.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (18741936)