Museum of the Home

You are standing before the Museum of the Home, a site that began its life in seventeen-fourteen as a sanctuary for the elderly poor. These structures were originally fourteen almshouses, built to provide housing for widows of the Ironmongers Company. The funding for this project came from a bequest by Sir Robert Geffrye, a merchant who served as Lord Mayor of London and grew significantly wealthy through his investments in the forced labor and trading of enslaved Africans. For nearly two centuries, these rooms served as a place of rest for dozens of pensioners before the buildings were repurposed into a museum in nineteen-fourteen.