Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
13
Road, and easily explored on foot, but to reach more mainstream sights such as the
Museum of Childhood
, you'll need to hop on public transport.
Mile End Road
he
Mile End Road
is an extension of Whitechapel Road, and the westernmost
section, known as the Mile End Waste, is punctuated at the western end by a bust,
and at the eastern by a more dramatic statue, of William Booth, founder of the
Salvation Army (see below). There are also two unusual architectural features
worth mentioning nearby. The more surprising is the
Trinity Almshouses
, a quaint
courtyard of cottages with a central chapel, built in 1695 for “Twenty-eight decay'd
Masters and Commanders and the widows of such”. Further up, on the same side
of the street, stands a large Neoclassical former department store, sporting a central
domed tower, its facade of Ionic half-columns sliced in two by a small two-storey
shop (currently boarded up) that used to belong to a Jewish watchmaker called
Spiegelhalter
. This architectural oddity is the result of a dispute between
Spiegelhalter and his a
uent Gentile neighbour, Thomas Wickham, who was
forced to build his new store around the watchmaker's shop after he refused to be
bought out.
Ragged School Museum
46-50 Copperfield Rd • Wed & Thurs 10am-5pm, first Sun of month 2-5pm • Free •
T
020 8980 6405,
W
raggedschoolmuseum.org.uk
•
!
Mile End
South of the Mile End Road, on the bombed-out remains of Copperfield Road, the
Ragged School Museum
occupies a Victorian canalside warehouse originally used to
store lime juice. Accommodating more than one thousand pupils from 1877 to 1908,
this was the largest of London's numerous Ragged Schools, institutions that provided
free education and two free meals daily to children with no means to pay the penny a
week charged by most Victorian schools. This particular Ragged School was just one of
innumerable projects set up by the East End's most irrepressible philanthropist, the
diminutive and devout
Dr Thomas Barnardo
, whose tireless work for the children of the
East End is the subject of the ground-floor exhibition. Upstairs, there's a reconstructed
Victorian schoolroom, where period-dressed teachers, cane in hand, take today's
schoolkids through the rigours of a Victorian lesson - the public can experience the
same treatment on Sunday openings (2.15 & 3.30pm; £2 donation suggested). On the
top floor you can see two contrasting mock-up kitchens from the 1890s and the 1950s.
There are also further displays on the nearby docks and local sweatshops, and a
canalside café back on the ground floor.
EAST END PHILANTHROPISTS
The poverty of the East End has attracted numerous philanthropists over the years, particularly
during the Victorian era, from Dr Barnardo, of Ragged School fame, to Lady Burdett-Coutts,
whose fountain still stands in Victoria Park. The most famous of the lot, however, was
William
Booth
(1829-1912), a pawnbroker by trade and a Methodist lay preacher. One June evening
in 1865, Booth was preaching to the crowds of revellers outside
The Blind Beggar
. Some fellow
missioners were so impressed they asked him to lead a series of meetings in a tent they had
set up on the Mile End Waste. Booth and his wife then set up the Christian Mission, which
eventually led to the foundation, in 1878, of the quasi-military Christian movement known as
the
Salvation Army
. In contrast to many Victorian philanthropists, Booth never accepted the
divisive concept of the deserving and undeserving poor - “if a man was poor, he was
deserving”. Booth railed against the laissez-faire economic policies of his era, while attending
to the immediate demands of the poor, setting up soup kitchens and founding hostels, which,
by the time of his death in 1912, had spread right across the globe. Booth is buried in Abney
Park Cemetery (see p.292).
