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:
“Hell and damnation,
life is such fun
with a ragged greatcoat
and a Jerry gun!”
—Alexander Blok (1880–1921)
“A sure proportion of rogue and dunce finds its way into every school and requires a cruel share of time, and the gentle teacher, who wished to be a Providence to youth, is grown a martinet, sore with suspicions; knows as much vice as the judge of a police court, and his love of learning is lost in the routine of grammars and books of elements.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The back meets the front.”
—Hawaiian saying no. 2650, ‘lelo No’Eau, collected, translated, and annotated by Mary Kawena Pukui, Bishop Museum Press, Hawaii (1983)