The Foundling Museum

The Foundling Museum We are a museum where art, care and compassion meet. Discover timeless, human stories that speak across generations. Visit us Tuesday-Sunday.

We’re free for 21 & under. We present the story of the Foundling Hospital, the UK’s first children’s charity and public art gallery. Founded in 1739 by the campaigner Thomas Coram, it was an innovative home for children whose mothers couldn’t care for them, supported by some of the leading artists of the day including William Hogarth, George Frideric Handel and Charles Dickens. Their compassion an

d generosity show that art transforms lives. Inspired by our 300-year history of social change, today we work with outstanding contemporary artists, writers and musicians to deliver ambitious projects for young people and marginalised groups. With a focus on local communities, early years and care-experienced young people, our pioneering work delivers positive and lasting outcomes. Across the four floors of the Museum we present this relevant historic story through our art and objects. Discover objects and records from the original Foundling Hospital, extraordinary works of art and furnishings, thought-provoking exhibitions plus a programme of concerts, talks and children’s workshops. You can visit us Tuesday-Saturday 10am-5pm, and Sunday 11am-5pm. Plus, we’re free for age 21 and under.

Save the date! 'Where We Grow: nature, nurture & childhood' opens this autumn at the Foundling Museum 🌱 Through historic...
04/09/2026

Save the date! 'Where We Grow: nature, nurture & childhood' opens this autumn at the Foundling Museum 🌱

Through historic objects, contemporary art, photography and archival material, ‘Where We Grow’ will explore the powerful relationship between childhood, childcare and the natural world.

From the Foundling Hospital’s 18th-century landscape to the gardens, playgrounds and green spaces that continue to shape children’s lives today, the exhibition will invite visitors to consider what we need from the places where we play, live and learn. It will reveal and interrogate how nature can offer freedom, imagination and belonging, and what happens when access to it is unequal.

Alongside historic objects and artworks including 18th-century seed lists, rarely-seen fabric tokens and the botanical motifs woven throughout the Museum’s extraordinary Rococo Court Room Gallery, ‘Where We Grow’ will feature newly-commissioned and existing works from contemporary artists including Joy Gregory, Andy Holden, Jade de Montserrat, Mark Neville, Larry Achiampong and David Blandy.

This exhibition is free with Museum entry, and can be revisited for free within a year of your initial visit with an Annual Pass.

'Where We Grow' opens November 17. Find out more and book your ticket now on our website.

🔍 Andy Holden, 'How the artist was led to the study of nature', 2020. Photo credit: Daniel Brown. Courtesy the artist;
Token: Calico printed with a bird, 1759. Courtesy Coram;
Jade de Montserrat, 'Quiet as it’s kept II', 2024. Courtesy the artist and Bosse & Baum;
'Children in the long grass', Coram’s Fields, London, c. 1929. Courtesy Coram’s Fields

Sports Day 1899 style 🏃With the start of the new school year around the corner, we're doing a throw-back to this photo f...
30/08/2026

Sports Day 1899 style 🏃

With the start of the new school year around the corner, we're doing a throw-back to this photo from the Foundling Hospital archives showing boys from the Hospital getting ready for a sack race. As well as the sack race this particular event also featured three-legged and egg and spoon races. Hard to imagine a P.E. teacher today in a top hat and tails...

📷 Archival photo of Foundling Hospital pupils on Sports Day, 1899. Courtesy Coram.

Mark Askew was born in 1942 and was put into the care of the Foundling Hospital at 10 months old. It wasn’t until he was...
28/08/2026

Mark Askew was born in 1942 and was put into the care of the Foundling Hospital at 10 months old. It wasn’t until he was in his 40s that a neighbour suggested he look into his birth family. He was able to trace—and meet—his birth mother, Dorothy.

Not every former pupil of the Foundling Hospital who has reconnected with their birth mothers have had successful reunions. Happily for Mark, he was able to develop a good relationship with Dorothy, which lasted until her death. He described the experience:

‘We arranged to meet at Euston station... When she got off the train, instantly I– I saw her and I knew it was her.

‘One of the things she did... was to ask me to put my head down. She checked the back of my neck and she said 'oh yeah, that's my boy.’ The creases on the back of my head as a baby, they're still there. She could identify with that.

‘We did talk quite late into the early hours... about the ‘whys’ and the ‘wherefores’, and it wasn't by choice, and they thought it best, and... a little bit of background about how times were so different then.

‘Meeting my mum... was a part of a jigsaw which helped me look at the world in a different way. Prior to that I felt a little bit like a cork in the sea, a bit tossed and turned and not really, sort of, got any real roots.’

After leaving the Hospital School at Berkhamsted, Mark started a 'brilliant' apprenticeship in aircraft manufacturing, and later worked for BEA (later British Airways) for 38 years. He married his wife Jan in 1967, and they had one son.

Hear Mark in his own words as part of our oral history project, Foundling Voices, available on our website.⁠

To discover more stories from former pupils of the Foundling Hospital, and the Foundling Museum’s work to record them, join our Collections Manager for ‘Meet the Experts: Alison Duke on Foundling Voices’. Join us on Friday 4 September in person or online. Tickets are available on our website.

📷 Mark as a boy in his Foundling Hospital uniform
Mark in his foster family’s garden.
Mark aged 68 in his home.

Woof! It’s 🐕 We’re celebrating by diving into our collection store for these beautiful line drawings by beloved illust...
26/08/2026

Woof! It’s 🐕

We’re celebrating by diving into our collection store for these beautiful line drawings by beloved illustrator and writer Sir Quentin Blake.

These artworks are from two series, ‘Children and Dogs’ which was created in 2004, and ‘Children, Birds & Dogs’ which was created in 2019.

In Sir Quentin’s own words, they ‘look at the relationship of the children I draw with living things around them – sometimes positive but often tentative – comparable to the ones they may have to the world around them’.

🔍 Quentin Blake, ‘Children with birds & dogs #14’, 2019
‘Children with birds & dogs #8’, 2019
‘Children with birds & dogs #6’, 2019
‘Children and dogs #7’, 2004

Donated by the artist in 2020. All works © the artist.

What do you see? What do you not see? 🪞 ‘Through a Glass III’ by Rachel Kneebone originally came to the Museum as part o...
24/08/2026

What do you see? What do you not see? 🪞

‘Through a Glass III’ by Rachel Kneebone originally came to the Museum as part of our 2025 exhibition ‘Self-Made: Reshaping Identities’, which explored the medium of clay as a way to reflect on the blurred and malleable boundaries of identity and self-creation. From a series of five porcelain cartouches, Kneebone’s piece reinterprets the traditional decorative frame into something more open and fragile, like a mirror. Highly intricate, its cracks, fissures and delicate layers invite viewers to reflect on imperfections, absences and possibilities.

We were delighted to acquire this work for our permanent Collection in 2025, as a generous donation from the artist. It is currently on display in the Museum.

🔍 Rachel Kneebone (b. 1973), ‘Through a Glass III’, 2023, donated by the artist, 2025

21/08/2026

Take a break from scrolling and listen in... 🐑 
 
This is ‘A Piping Shepherd Boy’, believed to be by Tommaso Salini. When it was donated to the Foundling Hospital in 1891, it had been attributed to a different artist, Pier Francesco Mola, an attribution that was only reconsidered in the 1980s.  

This painting was covered in a thick layer of yellowed varnish until 2018, when we had it cleaned and x-rayed. While questions around attribution remain, conservators found that the boy’s bent leg was painted over the dog, who seems to have been originally depicted in full. You can see where the boy’s tunic lines up perfectly with the dog’s neck. 
  
🔍 Tommaso Salini (c.1575-1625), ‘A Piping Shepherd Boy’, c.1620–25

In 1936, John Caldicott’s mother Daisy brought him to the Foundling Hospital, when he was three months old. He spent his...
19/08/2026

In 1936, John Caldicott’s mother Daisy brought him to the Foundling Hospital, when he was three months old.

He spent his early years with a foster mother in Essex and then returned to the Foundling Hospital School in Berkhamsted, where he lived until 1954 when the Hospital ended institutional care. While at the Hospital, John discovered a love of music. He met his wife Kay working in his first job in a radio and musical instrument shop, and they have been married for 65 years.

John has been an active presence at the Foundling Museum since its opening in 2004, and we were honoured to commission this portrait of him in 2021 as part of the Foundling Portraits project. Until 2021, there were no portraits of named foundlings or former pupils on the walls of the Museum. To change that, John was one of five living former pupils who sat for five leading photographers.

John was photographed by Mahtab Hussain, a British fine art portrait photographer whose work is held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and has been exhibited at Ikon Gallery, New Art Exchange and the Hayward Gallery.

The photograph is printed on a large mirror and hangs on our main staircase. As visitors ascend the stairs, they see themselves reflected in John's portrait.

To learn more about John’s extraordinary story, join us on Monday 28 September for an in-conversation between John and care-experienced storyteller and theatre-maker Isabelle Kirkham, linking generations and narratives of children's social care from John’s experiences in the 1930s and 40s to the care system today.

🔍 Mahtab Hussain (b.1981), '‘Reflections’ - Portrait of John aka Jack Caldicott', 2021

Making hay while the sun shines ☀️📷 Archival photo of Foundling Hospital pupils on summer camp, early 20th century
16/08/2026

Making hay while the sun shines ☀️

📷 Archival photo of Foundling Hospital pupils on summer camp, early 20th century

This silver disc was left as an identifying token with a baby at the Foundling Hospital in the 18th century. We don't kn...
13/08/2026

This silver disc was left as an identifying token with a baby at the Foundling Hospital in the 18th century. We don't know which child it was brought with, but the story behind it gives us an insight into the Enlightenment ideas that shaped the 18th century in England.

This token is an admission ticket to a lecture by Dr Erasmus King.

Dr King gave lectures in 'experimental philosophy' between 1730 and 1756. Today, we’d call experimental philosophy ‘empirical science’, the study of science based on experimentation and evidence.

As a scientist-entertainer, he introduced his audiences to topics like anatomy, astronomy, electricity, mechanics, physics and chemistry, through a mix of theatre and science.

Dr King didn’t just describe experiments but performed them using devices of his own design, including a rotating model showing the orbits of the sun, moon and earth.

Alongside his lectures, Dr King ran daytime courses for women which he advertised in his wife's lace shop. We can't know how the woman that left this token with her child came by it, whether she attended a course herself or came across it by chance.

Because it was one of dozens of tokens that were separated from admission records in the 19th century, we haven’t been able to match this token to a child.

However, it does hint at the varied backgrounds of the women who sought help from the Foundling Hospital, and provides an insight into the exciting scientific spirit of the age.

On this day Dr Richard Mead, doctor, philanthropist and patron of the arts, was born 🩺 Well known throughout his life fo...
11/08/2026

On this day Dr Richard Mead, doctor, philanthropist and patron of the arts, was born 🩺

Well known throughout his life for his amiability, dedication to his work, and support of charities like the Foundling Hospital, the writer Samuel Johnson is said to have commented that Mead, his friend, ‘lived more in the broad sunshine of life than almost any man’.

He was the leading doctor in England, attending the prime minister, Sir Isaac Newton, and Queen Anne; an expert on the spread and prevention of smallpox, measles and plague, and pioneer on poisons; and a founding Governor of the Foundling Hospital.

Dr Mead was born in 1673, the 11th of 13 children. After studying in Europe, by the early 18th century he was one of the leading physicians in England, and was personal physician to George II.

He was also an avid collector, amassing a library of over 10,000 volumes, and a lifelong patron of the arts. Allan Ramsay, who painted the portrait of Mead in the Foundling Museum's Collection, was supported by Mead in his early career.

Dr Mead was also something of a character. During his extensive research on poisons, he is said to have proven that snake venom was ineffective when taken orally by swallowing it himself.

In 1719 he allegedly fought a sword duel with a rival doctor in defence of his theories on smallpox (fortunately the other doctor fell over before any blows could be exchanged).

It was his work on smallpox that made a lasting impact on the life of the Foundling Hospital.

An early supporter of Thomas Coram’s campaign to open an institution for the welfare of London’s most vulnerable children, Mead served as a founding Governor and informed much of the medical care at the Hospital.

Under his direction, the children of the Foundling Hospital were inoculated against smallpox decades before Edward Jenner pioneered the vaccine. He oversaw medical care at the Hospital and occasionally attended to the children himself.

Upon Dr Mead’s death in 1754, he left £100 to the Hospital in his will, worth over £10,000 today. By coincidence, Mead’s house on Great Ormond Street later became the site of Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children.

🔍 Allan Ramsay (1713–84), ‘Portrait of Dr Richard Mead’, 1747

Estimated currency value from the National Archives.

Address

40 Brunswick Square
London
WC1N1AZ

Opening Hours

Tuesday 10am - 5pm
Wednesday 10am - 5pm
Thursday 10am - 5pm
Friday 10am - 5pm
Saturday 10am - 5pm
Sunday 11am - 5pm

Telephone

+442078413600

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when The Foundling Museum posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Museum

Send a message to The Foundling Museum:

Shortcuts

Share

Category