The Foundling Hospital was a charitable institution founded in 1739 by the philanthropic sea captain Thomas Coram to house and educate abandoned and orphaned children.

It was established under royal charter by King George II and was supported by many noted figures of the day in high society and the arts.

In 1926, the Foundling Hospital relocated temporarily to Redhill, Surrey, while a new, purpose-built school was constructed in Berkhamsted on land obtained from the Ashlyns Estate.

In 1955, after protracted negotiations, the Ashlyns School and the Foundling Hospital estate (including staff houses in Coram Close) were sold to Hertfordshire County Council for the sum of £225,000.

In 2013, the Australian rock band Tame Impala shot the music video for their single "Mind Mischief", from their album Lonerism, on the school premises.

Set in extensive grounds, it is designed in a Neo-Georgian (Neoclassical) style, laid out as a symmetrical group of school buildings linked by colonnades of stone columns and organised around a courtyard.

[3] When it was opened, the chapel at Berkhamsted was fitted out with a number of fixtures and artefacts which had been transferred from the original Foundling Hospital Chapel in London, including a bust of the composer George Frederick Handel; the original 18th-century wooden pews, including the "Governors' pews"; several stained glass windows; the ornate iron communion rail; a baptismal font dating from 1804; a mid-nineteenth-century pulpit; and a number of 18th and 19th-century memorials, many of which made reference to burials in St George's, Bloomsbury, the parish church that stood next to the old Foundling Hospital.

[11] Nikolaus Pevsner also mentions the statue of Thomas Coram by the sculptor William Calder Marshall, which had once stood at the entrance gates of the Bloomsbury Hospital grounds.