Historical Collections

From dolly pegs to dip pens, beer bottles to ration books, slate boards to tin baths – the Ragged School Museum is home to thousands of ordinary yet historic objects from the people of the East End of London.

The historic artefacts we hold in collection relate to the work of Dr Barnardo in East London and how school, work and home life in the local area has changed since then.

Visitors to the Museum can see...

Items relating to school life:

• School desks, slate boards, dip pens, ink bottles, ink wells and ink pourers.
• Certificates, medals, letters of reference, bibles and story books awarded to children who attended the Ragged Schools and London’s other Free Schools for the Poor.
• School textbooks and copybooks.
• Photographs of nineteenth-century London and of the children and families who were helped by Dr. Barnardo.
• Publications produced by Dr Barnardo to promote his East End missionary work.

Items relating to home life:

• A cast iron mangle, kitchen range, kettle, saucepan, shoe last and flat irons displayed ‘at home’ in our Victorian East End Kitchen.
• The kitchen also boasts common nineteenth-century household tin mugs, plates, carpet beaters, toasting forks, lanterns, rolling pins, graters, mincers, buckets, a tin bath, a copper, a set of possers and even hair curlers.
• The Museum’s domestic collection also includes Victorian sewing machines, various items of household furniture, World War II gas masks and identity cards and even the grand clock which once mounted the Victoria Park Lido.

Items relating to work life:

• Docker’s pad hooks, a model of the Bryant and May Match Factory, artefacts from Truman’s Brewery and print blocks from a Jewish Brick Lane Printers.

If you have an object or a photograph that you’d like to donate to the Museum please call the Museum or click here.