The ayah would accompany the British family back to England, either on the seasonal trips to escape the Indian summer or on retirement of the colonial official.

Without official contracts or guarantees for return passages, some ayahs then had their employment terminated or were abandoned, forcing them to live in squalor or to beg.

[4] Life in the Home was an amalgamation of oriental and western tradition, with Indian food, the playing of pachis (a board game), embroidery and outings to places of interest such as Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace.

[9] In 1910, Mrs Dunn, the matron of the Home, gave evidence to the Committee on Distressed Colonial and Indian Subjects of the India Office.

[5][8] Among the evidence that was given by Mrs Dunn and also recorded in correspondence between the Home and the India Office was of an ayah who was brought to England from Bombay by a British woman in 1908, who, in the usual manner, released her to Thomas Cook and Son in order to transfer her employment.

Re-employed by the Drummond family of Edinburgh who had pledged her return to India, she was abandoned at London's King's Cross Station, leaving her with one pound after two weeks' work.

[18] In 2013, the Royal Shakespeare Company produced Tanika Gupta's play The Empress, about Queen Victoria, the equally real Abdul Karim, who became her teacher (munshi), and a fictional young ayah[19] who was abandoned at Tilbury Docks by her employers.

[20] Gupta was inspired to write the play when her curiosity was piqued by a photograph from the Ayah's Home reproduced in the work of Rozina Vishram.

In 2019 Pearson Edexcel added The Empress to its list of GCSE English literature texts,[23] ensuring that the story of the ayahs and their Hackney home reaches schools across England.

[26] In October 2016, Meera Syal drew attention to the Ayahs' Home in the Sky Arts programme Treasures of the British Library (series 1, episode 2).

[27] The writer and actress selected letters concerning the plight of one unnamed woman, stranded by the Drummond family as described above, and how she found her way to the Ayahs' Home.

The British Library documented this, with photographs of the correspondence and of the building, in a post entitled "An abandoned ayah" in its Untold Lives blog.

[28] The ayahs featured in the 2018 BBC Two series A Passage to Britain, in which historian Yasmin Khan used ships' passenger records to trace the stories of migration from the Indian subcontinent from the 1930s-1950s.

[30] Supported by the council's arts and culture representative[31] and the local MP Rushanara Ali,[30] the project aims to bring the history of ayahs to light.

It launched on International Women's Day 2020 at Hackney Museum,[32] with presentations from academics, including Rozina Visram, still "the acknowledged authority", according to The Guardian review of the event.

[33] The launch also included elements aimed at a younger audience, such as a poetry workshop and spoken word performance by The Yoniverse Collective,[34] and a visual exhibition in partnership with the East End Women's Museum.