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The workhouse is an inconvenient building, with small windows, low rooms and dark staircases. It is surrounded by a high wall, that gives it the appearance of a prison, and prevents free circulation of air. There are 8 or 10 beds in each room, chiefly of flocks, and consequently retentive of all scents and very productive of vermin.
Plan view of Kempthorne's cruciform design for a workhouse accommodating 300 paupers. Sampson Kempthorne (1809–1873) was an English architect who specialised in the design of workhouses , before his emigration to New Zealand.
George Wilkinson won a competition in 1835 to design a workhouse for the Thame Poor Law Union. [2] The building was until 2004 a campus of Oxford and Cherwell Valley College . Wilkinson went on to design a total of two dozen workhouses in England, including those at Northleach (1835) [ 3 ] [ 4 ] Stow-on-the-Wold (1836) [ 5 ] and Woodstock (1836 ...
An example of one such is Strand House in East Sussex. In the early Victorian era (see Poor Law), poverty was seen as a dishonourable state. As depicted by Charles Dickens, a workhouse could resemble a reformatory, often housing whole families, or a penal labour regime giving manual work to the indigent and subjecting them to physical ...
Camberwell workhouse (in Peckham, South London) continued until 1985 as a shelter for more than 1000 homeless men, operated by the Department of Health and Social Security and renamed a resettlement centre. [13] Southwell workhouse, now a museum, was used to provide temporary accommodation for mothers and children until the early 1990s.
The desire to treat all those in poverty via one policy stems from the same impulses that led to reform of poor laws in the 19th century.
The Brabazon scheme was initiated in 1882 by Lady Brabazon, later the Countess of Meath, to provide occupation for the non-able-bodied inmates of workhouses in crafts such as knitting, embroidery and lace making.
In 1805 Sir John Carr in his Tour of Ireland described the workhouse as "A gloomy abode of mingled want, disease, vice and malady, where lunatics were loaded with heavy chains and fallen women bound and logged"; [9] and Parliament believed the House of Industry was a failure and "completely worthless". [10] Described as 'the Dublin Poor House ...