History

Founded in 1843 as part of the Ragged Schools movement in a hay loft over a cow shed in Holborn, the Charity aimed to use education to break the cycle of deprivation and poverty in which the street children of London were trapped. The work attracted the patronage and active support of the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury who used his influence to secure the use of two redundant warships (Chichester and Arethusa) to house up to 400 boys on the Thames. The refuges in the Soho/Covent Garden area and the two ships housed boys and girls teaching the former the trades of carpentry, cobbling and tailoring in addition to seamanship skills, and the latter the skills necessary to fit them for domestic service.

At the turn of the century more than 1000 children were in the residential care of the charity which changed its name in 1904 from The National Refuge for Homeless and Destitute Children to Shaftesbury Homes and Arethusa.

Over the next 40 years the refuges in London amalgamated and relocated out of London in large institutional schools (Bisley Farm School, Fortescue House, Esher Place (girls), Royston) but after the second world war the expansion of the fostering system gradually reduced the demand for places and the large institutions were sold, scaling down the childcare to a more domestic size. The change in the school leaving age in the early 1970s closed the gap between leaving school and the entry age for the adult armed services and the Arethusa no longer had a role and was sold to the South Street Seaport Museum in New York.

Children's homes owned and run by the charity came and went as demand dictated during the 70s and 80s until 1993 when the first service level agreement for a partnership between a local authority and a charity was signed with Wandsworth and the charity has managed Wandsworth's residential homes ever since. In 1998 a similar contract was signed with Lambeth. In 2004, Shaftesbury Homes & Arethusa formed a new partnership with Southwark Council, taking on the management of three children's homes in the borough.

Supported housing and Care leaver units have been run in Suffolk and London since 1990 including a Young Persons Support Service in Islington since 2003. The Arethusa Venture Centre on the Medway has been developed with Lottery Funding to provide residential adventurous courses for primary school children from Inner London and the more deprived boroughs of Kent and Medway.