Redbridge Museum will open a new permanent exhibition later this year exploring 200,000 years of local history. In the fourth of a series of articles, Museum Officer Nishat Alam looks at some of the items on show
Barnardo’s is the largest children’s charity in the UK. It’s named after Dr Thomas Barnardo who, in 1866, began to open schools and homes to take care of orphans and children, then referred to as ‘destitute waifs’. In 1876, he opened the Village Home for Girls in Barkingside, where the headquarters of the charity are still based. In this article, I look at a similar home the charity set up for boys in Woodford Bridge, in a village named the ‘Garden City’, and the problems around Victorian philanthropy.
In 1910, Barnardo’s opened the Garden City for Boys at Gwynne House in Woodford Bridge, a large 18th-century house with 39 acres of land. The open green spaces and fresh air of the Woodford countryside would have been thought of as a refreshing change for the 300 boys who had been moved from Barnardo’s homes in London’s cramped East End.
Like the Village Home in Barkingside, the Garden City provided everything its residents could need: houses where they lived in ‘family groups’ with a house mother, a hospital, church and farmland, to name a few. The boys attended school and learned skills that would one day allow them to pick up a trade, like baking, tailoring and gardening. The Garden City was open to boys up to the age of 15; some came in as much younger children and stayed for much of their childhoods and others only for a while.
The Garden City was built only a few years after the death of Dr Barnardo, but it echoed the methods with which he’d started his charity. Barnardo was a rich and religious philanthropist at a time when it was widely agreed that people like him were best positioned to improve the lives of the poor. But his work was criticised even during his lifetime. Though many young residents of homes like Garden City were orphans, others still had living parents who they had been removed from if Barnardo felt their homes were abusive or too poor. It was a typical attitude of the Victorian middle and upper classes that is no longer as widely held today.
In fact, as the thinking around children in care changed, the demand for homes like Barnardo’s waned. From the 1970s, the land that made up Garden City was slowly sold off. Much of it became private housing and Gwynne House, where the boys’ home had first opened, was redeveloped as The Prince Regent Hotel.
The new Redbridge Museum, opening in the next few months, will explore the borough’s historic institutions, like Barnardo’s homes. On display will be objects and other material from our collections, such as the postcard above showing a photograph of some of the boys of Woodford’s Garden City.
Redbridge Museum is located on Clements Road, Ilford. Visit swvg.co.uk/rm
To complete a survey on what else should go on display, visit swvg.co.uk/rms
