Workhouse
Southwell, Nottinghamshire
The Workhouse is an unusually large poorhouse built in 1824, ten years before the New Poor Law, and in some degree was the model upon which the whole network of workhouses built across the country after 1834 was based. Its intricate design embodies the key principles of the new law: the segregation of the able-bodied and the infirm, the separation of men, women and children, and the maintenance of the able-bodied in ‘less eligible’ conditions by means of hard unremunerative labour. It was in use as a State institution until comparatively recently (modern buildings adjoining are still used by the social services). Acquired by the National Trust, and lavishly restored with assistance from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Workhouse opened to the public in 2002.
This has been an experiment for the Trust, as the Workhouse has few of the qualities that normally attract tourists to its properties, apart from an imposing elevation and a lovely semi-rural situation. So far, however, the experiment has been a resounding success. Visitor numbers exceed expectations and the Workhouse is in hot demand amongst school groups. Study of Victorian social conditions and policy forms part of the National Curriculum at every level from KS2 to A2. Groups of up to 60 are accommodated four days a week over four months of the school year, and efforts are being made to expand this schedule. The Trust’s education department has devised elaborate role-playing scenarios for the younger children, which take them through the daily round of the pauper child. Programmes for advanced levels can be tailored to the group.
One option is the visitors’ audioguide, which takes the form of a ‘radio play’, re-creating the visit of a Victorian gentleman who gets a thorough tour and is embroiled in little touches of authentic drama and pathos along the way. This helps to bring life and colour to a very spare physical environment, a controversial decision having been taken not to furnish or decorate the interior. Only one room has been furnished in roughly its mid-Victorian form, and one room has been left as it was when last used for emergency accommodation in the 1960s. Another option for schools is a sophisticated role-play in which pupils are put in the shoes of the Poor Law Guardians and asked to make decisions about relief and punishment in representative cases. This role-play and other discussion formats addressing ‘needs’ and ‘wants’ cater to the current curricular emphasis on citizenship, but it is not proving easy to connect the historical presentation with presentday questions of participation, inequality, welfare and so on.
This is still an experiment in progress. There are some conflicts between theTrust’s ethos of preservation to very high standards and the re-creation of a credible historic environment. But the Workhouse takes the Trust and its audiences into realms of social, economic and political history not normally well-served by historic buildings. Because the records of the poor law are so full, the Workhouse provides a backdrop for the in-depth recreation of lived experience which not even industrial archaeology sites have been able to match. PM
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