The Foundling Museum, London, celebrates the opening of a new and highly emotive exhibition entitled Threads of Feeling. The exhibition will display fabrics never shown before, and will illustrate the moment of parting when mothers left their babies at the original Foundling Hospital.

In the cases of more than 4,000 babies left between 1741 and 1760, a small object or token - usually a piece of fabric - was kept as an identifying record. The fabric was either provided by the mother or cut from the child’s clothing by the Hospital's nurses, attached to registration forms and bound up into ledgers. Theses pieces of fabric form the largest collection of everyday textiles surviving in Britain from the 18^th Century...

Download the Threads of Feeling press release