The Doulton fairytale panels in the South Wing corridor of St Thomas’ Hospital get star billing in issue 22 (2017) of the GIST, the Guy’s and St Thomas’s magazine ‘History Corner’ feature. Margaret Thompson and William Rowe’s panels, made a short walk away at the Doulton factory in Vauxhall, once brightened up the two children’s […]
‘Representations of the Child, displayed at Vauxhall Gardens and the Foundling Hospital’
Miriam Al Jamil has kindly given The Vauxhall Society her 2013 King’s College, London dissertation on how children are portrayed in the art of Vauxhall Gardens and in that of the Foundling Hospital*. *© Miriam Al Jamil Among the many fascinating insights Al Jamil explores is the role of this tiny Vauxhall Gardens copper ‘season […]
Orphanages
The Stockwell Orphanage for boys was founded by Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the pastor of the Metropolitan Tabernacle (Elephant and Castle). His church had already supported a number of alms houses and following a prayer meeting at which Spurgeon had stressed the need for an orphanage and an article in The Sword and Trowel in 1866, […]
Inquest on boy flogged at Lambeth Workhouse
Extract from The London Medical Gazette 1837-8 Editorial – Inquest on boy flogged at Lambeth Workhouse The gist of the case may be comprised in a small compass. The boy, whose age is not stated, had been in Lambeth Workhouse, where he was flogged by a Mr Rowe, with such severity, that the body, when […]
Belgrave Hospital for Children
Belgrave Hospital for Children was founded in 1866. The attractive red-brick Arts & Crafts-style building at 1 Clapham Road was constructed in phases between 1899 and 1926 to a design by Henry Percy Adams and Charles Holden. The hospital used an innovative quasi-cruciform plan, with separate ward wings linked by connecting corridors and bridges, thus […]
Lambeth Ragged School
Ragged schools were free school for poor vagrant children, where they were taught and usually given food. The name comes from the pupils’ ragged appearance. The schools gave children some basic instruction, in often makeshift accommodation, and helped them find work, or even to emigrate. In 1818 John Pounds, a Portsmouth shoemaker, started teaching poor […]
Society for Waifs and Strays
In the middle and late 1800s there were large numbers of poor and no social security system as we know it today. The only official system of support was the workhouse. These harsh, overcrowded and badly run institutions were really hated by the poor, many of whom would rather die than enter one. Charity […]
