Brunch at Forno Ragged Cafe

Housed in three warehouse buildings alongside the Regent’s Canal towpath between Mile End and Limehouse was once housed the largest ‘ragged’ or free school in Victorian London. The school’s origins trace back to 1867, when Thomas Barnardo (ie, Dr Barnardo), who had come to London to train as a doctor before becoming a missionary in China, was so moved by the poverty, disease, and lack of educational opportunities in the East End that he abandoned his plans in order to open his first ragged school. A decade later, in 1877, Barnardo’s Copperfield Road Free School opened in these former canal warehouses, providing free basic education to tens of thousands of the city’s poorest children over the next thirty-one years.

The school closed in 1908 once government schools became available in the area, and the buildings subsequently served various industrial purposes until facing demolition in the early 1980s. Local residents established the Ragged School Museum Trust and the museum opened in 1990.

The Museum underwent a recent refurbishment that started in 2020 and ended in 2023, and when it re-opened it did so with a cafe on the ground floor along the towpath. A while ago now we went to see some of the London Marathon near Limehouse and walked back up the canal. We stopped in at the cafe for brunch on the way home. Since then we’ve said we should return, but in the meantime, it was announced that Forno would be taking over the running of the cafe space. Forno Ragged Café opened at the end of September 2025.

With a January weekend to spare with little else to do, we decided to check it out for brunch.

I went to the gym in the morning and by the time I was home, had showered and made myself some semblance of presentable, it was coming up for midday. We ambled down the canal, dodging runners and cyclists and watching the coots brawling for a fight on the canal – watch the David Attenborough London documentary because it’s brilliant, but it does mean you won’t ever see a coot in the same way!

The interior of the cafe isn’t wildly different from its previous incarnation – it’s rustic with exposed beams and brickwork and old layers of peeled paint on the walls. Furniture is simple and the windows are large, offering an excellent view of all of the goings on along the towpath and on the canal outside – from where we sat I watched dogs go by, seagulls swoop over, Canada Geese glide by and a cormorant air out its wings.

Probably the biggest difference is that, in addition to the dine-in cafe, they opened up a takeaway option. So, right next to the cafe entrance on the towpath you can buy hot drinks, pastries and cakes and deli items all to take with you on your walk along the canal.

Because we were relatively late, we’d missed some of the breakfast/brunch dishes on the menu which are only available until 11.45am, but we still had a variety to choose from, along with the more lunch-y dishes.

My husband chose to order a variety of small brunch dishes, including toast served with butter and raspberry and rhubarb jam (delicious, albeit tricky to scoop up onto toast – they should sell this if they don’t already, I didn’t see it in the deli section)…

… granola with sumac-roasted plums, yoghurt and pomegranate seeds, and…

… porridge with poached pear, blackberry and an almond crumb. Each dish was his favourite until the next and then he just couldn’t choose.

I ordered a tea and the walnut and kale pesto trofie pasta. The tea never arrived (the only bum note) but we had water and the food arrived quickly so I never chased it and we got it taken off the bill at the end.

The pasta was delicious, it came covered in curls of cheese, and it had a good little kick of chilli in there too. I stole some of my husband’s toast to mop up the pesto sauce left in the bottom of the dish, perfection.

We were contemplating sharing a tart for dessert, but we were both pretty full, so we decided to take advantage of the takeaway space and purchased ourselves some little treats as a mid-afternoon snack – an orange and cardamon cake and an almond and pear frangipane tart (both great, but the tart was my personal favourite). We walked back home along the canal clutching our little takeaway boxes and enjoyed our sweet treats with a mid-afternoon cup of tea.