Music Through Time

Join us for a special, in-person Coram Society event to celebrate Coram’s long engagement with music. John Caldicott, a former Foundling Hospital pupil, and Philippa Dodds John MBE, lead organiser of Coram’s Handel Birthday Concert, will help us explore the changing role of music in Coram’s history.

Young people around the world are said to be facing a dramatic decline in their physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing. Building on the momentum of Mental Health Awareness Week 2024, this online Coram Society event will delve into mental health research insights and tackle the crucial question: what should we do?

The objects around us are intertwined with our feelings and experiences. Exploring our relationship with objects can help us tell our stories and give us a greater understanding of other people and ourselves.

We are excited to be joined by Kristen Renzi, Associate Professor of English at Xavier University, who is on a research sabbatical in London, working in Coram’s Foundling Hospital Archive. To mark Women's History Month, she will be discussing the lives of women in 19th and early 20th century London and aspects of her new work.

A play created in collaboration with Brian Mullin and care experienced young people as part of Coram's Voices Through Time: The Story of Care programme. A group of care-experienced young people are suspended in time – half in the modern world, half in the world of the Foundling Hospital. As they grapple with the challenges of today’s care system, they explore the stories and experiences of the very first children in care, unearthing common threads of experience across three centuries. Directed by Vicky Moran.

Featuring works by artists such as Grayson Perry, Joshua Reynolds, Tracey Emin, Chantal Joffe, Paula Rego, Lucian Freud and Alice Neel, the exhibition explores our changing understanding of ‘family’ in the last 50 years and considers what it means today.

Image credit: Sir Joshua Reynolds portrait, ‘The Braddyll Family’ (detail), 1789. Photograph © The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge.