Fanny Heese. Walter Raleigh. Ethelred Hovell. Martin Scaleshooe. Epaminodas Allen. Bifsell Stanes. Jenny Godmanchester. William Hogarth. Elizabeth Foundling.

These are just some of the names of the children who found themselves handed in at London’s Foundling Hospital, a charitable enterprise set up in the 18th century “for the care and maintenance of exposed and deserted young children”.

This wasn’t wholly accurate: in fact, for the majority of its life, mothers were expected to hand over their babies in person. The above are some of the new names given to these children by the hospital workers – a strange mix of the ordinary, the celebrity, and the bizarre.

Anne Dodo, Hopegood Helpless and Little John are others, from the many listed on the walls, that caught my eye.

The hospital was founded by philanthropist Thomas Coran, who returned to London from a life of seafaring and shipbuilding to be horrified by the sheer numbers of babies abandoned on the streets. It took seventeen years of petitioning, but the King finally granted a Charter, and the Foundling Hospital was born.

It seems weird to think of now, but the hospital was a deeply fashionable affair. People would flock to watch the children being fed at the weekend, like some kind of public zoo, and the great and the good bustled to be involved in this very new type of enterprise – a charity.

Handel performed fundraising concerts in the chapel, and Hogarth presented paintings and seemingly scammed his own raffle so that the hospital won his “March for Finchley”, which hands in the museum building today.

Alongside the art and the history were some very moving paintings and poems about adoption and belonging from recent adoptees, presented carefully amid the classic works. A building I had never noticed before, right next to the Brunswick Centre, turned out to house one of the city’s most interesting little museums.

The Hospital ceased to be soon after the Second World War, due to changing attitude and the creation of the welfare state. As we slowly carve away what remains of the safety net, I wonder, in fear, whether Corans of the future will be needed. The Elon Musk Academy For The Abandoned and Online doesn’t bear thinking about.

The Foundlings were often sent off to the military (if male) and into domestic service (if female). The education was designed for their class, aka preparing them for servitude, though in later years they did teach them more than the basics. And, given babies were being abandoned on rubbish tips, it was, for its time, very much the bastion of progress.