Medical London walk

To enter Coram’s Fields, a leafy park with a petting zoo and playground, visitors must be accompanied by a child. This charming restriction reflects its long history as the site of Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital.

Eighteenth–century London offered few provisions for orphans or unwanted babies. Illegitimacy was socially and morally unacceptable. Servants, for example, would almost certainly be fired if they became pregnant. Many children were abandoned in the streets or simply murdered. In 1739 Thomas Coram, a wealthy sea–captain who was himself an orphan, opened the Foundling Hospital – a home for abandoned children.

The hospital had many illustrious patrons including William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough and George Frederic Handel who held gala concerts of his Messiah to raise money for the orphans and even composed a Foundling Hospital anthem.

The main building was demolished in the 1920s and the Hospital moved to a site in Hertfordshire, leaving only the colonnades on either side of what would have been the main drive. The history of the Hospital is told in the nearby Foundling Museum, which you can find to the north of Coram’s Fields on Brunswick Square, and contains works by Hogarth and Handel in amongst artefacts relating to life at the hospital.