Welcome to Tooting180
Restoring the names, and dignity, of the forgotten children of Tooting
In the winter of 1848–49, nearly 200 children died in a cholera outbreak at a private pauper 'farm' in Tooting, South London. Their names were largely unrecorded in the histories. The man who ran the institution was tried for manslaughter, but ultimately acquitted. His name survived. Most of the children's did not.
Tooting180 is an ongoing research project to identify each of those lost children and tell their stories. With the help of volunteers and archival research, we are building a database of the boys and girls who passed through the Tooting and Brixton pauper farms — many of them poor, orphaned, or displaced by circumstance.
So far, we have:
- Identified 849 children who lived in the Drouet institutions in Tooting and Brixton
- Tracked 1,828 movements of children into and out of the homes
- Confirmed the identities of 24 of the 180 cholera victims
This is only the beginning. With your help we can recover more names, reconnect families scattered through the system, and give these children the dignity of remembrance.
Find out more about the Tooting180 project
Project status - May 2025
Recent additions to our archive include:
- Admission and discharge records from Newington St Mary, Clerkenwell Workhouse, and Southwark Christ Church workhouses
- Entries from Islington Infant Poor House mentioning Tooting
- Transcriptions of the inquests and trial
- Ongoing expansion of our searchable database
See our Analysis page for a deeper look at the stats
Chart 1. Pauper farm residents in the database, by gender