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The 'Red House' at Framlingham Castle in Suffolk was founded as a workhouse in 1664. [6] " The workroom at St James's workhouse", from The Microcosm of London (1808). The workhouse system evolved in the 17th century, allowing parishes to reduce the cost to ratepayers of providing poor relief.
People queuing at S. Marylebone workhouse circa 1900. In England, Wales and Ireland (but not in Scotland), [1] "workhouse" has been the more common term.Before the introduction of the Poor Laws, each parish would maintain its own workhouse; often these would be simple farms with the occupants dividing their time between working the farm and being employed on maintaining local roads and other ...
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.
In 1834, the United Kingdom passed a new Poor Law which created the system of Victorian workhouses (or "Houses of Industry") that Charles Dickens described in Oliver Twist. Sir Francis Bond Head , the new lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada in 1836, had been a Poor Law administrator before his appointment.
Boards administered workhouses within a defined poor law union consisting of a group of parishes, either by order of the Poor Law Commission, or by the common consent of the parishes. Once a union was established it could not be dissolved or merged with a neighbouring union without the consent of its board.
"The most obvious and the most distinctive feature of the History of Civilisation, during the last fifty years [1837–87], is the wonderful increase of industrial production by the application of machinery, the improvement of old technical processes and the invention of new ones, accompanied by an even more remarkable development of old and new means of locomotion and intercommunication."
The Workhouse Visiting Society which formed in 1858 highlighted conditions in workhouses [84] and led to workhouses being inspected more often. [85] The Union Chargeability Act 1865 was passed in order to make the financial burden of pauperism be placed upon the whole unions rather than individual parishes. [ 86 ]