21-05-2025
The children denied a childhood
Photo by Bjanka Kadic/Millennium Images
After a year of maternity leave, my mind is now a map of the best routes to walk around London's East End. Like the Knowledge, but for prams. My favourite follows the thicketed paths around Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park – the poorest and most overlooked of Victorian London's 'Magnificent Seven' private cemeteries. And not just because the gravel pathways rippling with roots are ideal terrain for jiggling a baby to sleep. Amid knotted fingers of sycamores and the drumming of woodpeckers lie 30 acres of stories about a place once synonymous with poverty – from the paupers' graves of Spanish flu victims to the dove of peace that memorialises Dr Barnardo's children.
Set back from the main path is a mottled white gravestone in the shape of an open book. It commemorates 'The Farthing Bundle Lady Clara E Grant', who died at the age of 82 in 1949. The headmistress of a local school, Grant set up an organisation in 1907 to feed and clothe the poor children of the East End, and sent nurses to visit the local families of newborns. But where Grant stood out from fellow social reformers was in her recognition that poverty goes beyond a lack of hot breakfasts and intact shoes. What the children she encountered really needed was to play.
The 'Bundle Woman of Bow' earned her nickname by putting together parcels of toys wrapped in newspaper and distributing them to poor children for a farthing each. Inside would be a recycled and donated miscellany of fun: buttons, marbles, shells, toy soldiers, old greetings cards and comics, worn stockings, used cotton reels, broaches, whistles, scraps of silk and patches of wool, 'doll-less heads or headless dolls'. Every Sunday at ten in the morning, children gathered at her premises to receive their bundles; this was so popular that a queue of hundreds would form by 6am. The tradition lasted from 1907 into the Eighties. As one recipient, quoted in the East End Women's Museum, recalled: 'It was something to look forward to as there wasn't many special treats.'
More than a century since the bundles of Bow began, too many of Britain's children still face a poverty of treats. Buttle UK, a charity for children in crisis that published a State of Child Poverty report earlier this year, revealed that 75,000 families could not afford toys in 2024. Ahead of Christmas in 2023, nearly half of parents surveyed by the community network Nextdoor said they were planning on spending less on their children's gifts that year.
While reporting on the height of the cost-of-living crisis, I interviewed many parents struggling to budget as their bills went up and food prices soared. What stayed with me from these conversations was the worry not just about paying for heating or school uniform, but the fear of failing to give their children treats.
Joanne, a single mother in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, who had to claim Universal Credit after her relationship broke down and she lost her cleaning job, told me the hardest conversation with her son about their financial situation was when she had to explain to him – a 12-year-old boy with special educational needs – that she could no longer afford their weekly ritual of a takeaway sandwich from Subway.
'I had to say, 'Maybe we can make it at home instead,'' she told me. 'But I'm running out of ideas, because you can only make it sound so fun for so long.' Even his favourite at-home treat of 'pretend ramen' (Pot Noodle with an egg and some chicken added) had spiralled out of her price range. He wanted to go with friends to Laser Quest for his 13th birthday; she couldn't say yes. All these joys were now impossible luxuries.
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Kim, a mother of four in Wales who cannot work because of her early-onset osteoarthritis and whose husband lost his job in construction, had to stop buying her children's favourite fruit and biscuits. 'It's heartbreaking when you look at your children's faces and say, 'There are no snacks in,'' she told me. 'Mentally, it's an absolute drain. You go to bed worried about the kids' birthdays, Christmas coming up, and there's nothing left; they're not going to happen this year, we just can't afford it.'
Food banks regularly appeal for toy donations, particularly ahead of Christmas, and for food donations beyond the basics. 'I always love it when we get some Charlie Bigham ready meals in,' a volunteer at one of Britain's busiest food banks, in Newcastle, told me. 'I want people to have a treat to enjoy.' Similarly, baby banks often now have a section for books and toys. I am struck by the rainforest of play gyms at my local baby bank – colourful giraffes, rainbows, mirrors and stars fluttering among the greyscale piles of nappies and muslins.
A few roads down from the cemetery where Clara Grant is buried is a 'toy library' called Toyhouse, crammed with rocking horses and scooters, xylophones and building blocks. It aims to improve the well-being of local families through play. One winter evening, when my daughter was about six months old, I balanced a bag of her toys on top of her pram and trundled them along to the toy library. She managed to pull a tiger face-shaped mirror from the pile back for herself.
On the way, as she gurgled at her reflection, I explained that there were some babies who weren't lucky enough to have toys of their own. She didn't understand, of course. But across Britain today, too many children, too soon, do.
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