Every Monday on Global Comment, we share Something Special you don’t want to miss. To fit with the six core pillars of the magazine, these will alternate between the themes of watch / listen / read / see / taste / place.
It will be something different every week, but it will always be about something worth seeing, hearing or watching, or a place worth visiting or a food worth tasting.
This week, listen to a fascinating episode of the Haptic and Hue podcast that talks about a collection of textiles that “recorded the identity and clothing of every baby accepted at the Foundling Hospital from the mid 1700s onwards”.
As the description of the episode describes,
What makes these books so moving is that often the birth mother left a scrap of cloth or ribbon when she gave up her baby. She held onto the other half so that if her circumstances changed, she could return to the Foundling Hospital, match the two pieces of cloth and reclaim her child. The result, two hundred and fifty years later, is one of the best collections of textiles samples worn by ordinary people in Europe the seventeen and eighteen hundreds.
This is an incredibly moving listen, and I learned so much about why these fabric scraps were so necessary, and what they can tell us now.
If you have any suggestions for future items to feature, contact us on our socials or at editor@globalcomment.com