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:
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—David Hare (b. 1947)
“And so they have left us feeling tired and old.
They never cared for school anyway.
And they have left us with the things pinned on the bulletin board.
And the night, the endless, muggy night that is invading our school.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Life is in the mouth; death is in the mouth.”
—Hawaiian saying no. 60, ‘lelo No’Eau, collected, translated, and annotated by Mary Kawena Pukui, Bishop Museum Press, Hawaii (1983)