Four o'clock and I'm heading off on my second walkabout of the day which will take us to a completely different part of London. Fitzrovia is one of the most expensive parts of London but here in the shadow of the BT Tower, only a few steps from rows of elegant Georgian houses, is a building that was once the last refuge of the most desperate members of the local population: Cleveland St Workhouse.
Only three Georgian workhouses are still standing in London and this one is the best-preserved (though possibly not for much longer as the local council is considering demolishing it to build social housing - see below for details of the campaign to save it or visit their website). This workhouse played a key role in political reforms which revolutionised state care for the sick, and it is also thought to have been the inspiration behind the most famous workhouse in literature: the home of Oliver Twist.
The nearest station for visiting it is Goodge St but I got off one stop earlier at Tottenham Court Road so I could visit Dean St where Dr Joseph Rogers, the social reformer who was chief medical officer at this institution, had his home. It’s an easy walk in an almost straight line from here to Cleveland St, and I like to imagine that Dr Rogers might have walked the same route every morning.
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| Route from Tottenham Court Road station to 33 Dean St |
On my way to Dean St I took a little detour into Soho Square Gardens which is an interesting place in its own right. First laid out in the 1680s, this was one of the most fashionable addresses in London in its heyday. In the 18th century it was home both to Charles II’s illegitimate son the Duke of Monmouth and the ambassadors of Venice, France, Sweden, Spain, Naples and Russia. By the end of the 1700s Mayfair was becoming more fashionable and the gentry moved away and their place was taken by wealthy professionals such as doctors, lawyers and architects. Today the square is home to some big media companies including 20th Century Fox and the British Board of Film Classification.
In the centre of the square there is a park surrounded by trees - one of which has pinkish white blossom just starting to appear, not that it feels very springlike today! In the middle of the grass there are a couple of rather lost-looking palms and a charming black and white half-timbered cottage used by the gardeners. With its pointed little roof and wonky windows it looks like something out of Snow White. Just in front of the cottage is a white statue of Charles II - originally this was called 'King's Square'. There is a crack running around the outline of his face as if it had once fallen off and had to be stuck on again. He doesn't look impressed.
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| Église Protestante Francaise de Londres |
There is another church round to the right, also built in red brick, with an imposing square tower and a white statue of its patron, St Patrick, built above the door. This is a Catholic church but it is built on the site of Carlisle House, which was home to Theresa Cornelys, an actress, adventurer, opera singer and lover of Casanova. She was born in Vienna in 1723 and moved to Carlisle House in 1760. Her home was renowned for wild parties, concerts and masquerades.
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| Plaque above the French Church's door (click to enlarge) |
These two churches reveal just how multicultural London was in the 19th century. Both were built c.1891-3 and the French church reflects the fact that almost half of Soho's population were Huguenots. There is a plaque above the door commemorating a royal charter issued by Edward VI in 1550 which granted asylum to these French Protestants. St Patrick's church, a nearby information board says, served the large Irish and Italian communities who lived in this part of the city.
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| 14 Soho Square |
Seacole was a Jamaican nurse who is best known for her work treating the wounded during the Crimean War in 1854-6. During her lifetime she was honoured along with Florence Nightingale.
Leaving Soho Square behind I made my way to Dean St, almost missing number 32, lost in admiring the sign of a pub called the 'Crown and Two Chairmen' which depicts a queen being carried in a sedan chair. Dr Rogers' old home is located on the corner of the junction with Bateman St. These days it is an Italian restaurant called Il Siciliano with a blue awning and a green front door, next to an old-fashioned hairdressers called Gino with a handpainted sign. But above the restaurant nothing seems to have changed; the upper storeys are very 19th-century with tall white windows and red brick walls. A blue plaque announces that 'Dr Joseph Rogers, 1821-1889, Health Care Reformer, lived here'.
Joseph Rogers was the chief medical officer at the workhouse that we are visiting today. He was also one of the most active and successful reformers of workhouse medicine, founding the Association of London Workhouse Infirmaries and working tirelessly to improve the terrible conditions he found at the Cleveland St institution. His efforts played an important role in forcing Parliament to implement nationwide reforms which radically changed the way state healthcare was provided.
When he arrived at Cleveland St in 1856, Dr Rogers was faced by 20 overcrowded wards filled with dead or dying paupers - in his report he says that 92% of the inmates were ill. In his memoirs, Reminiscences of a Workhouse Medical Officer (a unique historical source which you can read online here), he writes that the workhouse population 'never in my time fell below 500' and an inspection found 556 inmates forced to share 332 beds. Dr Rogers also complained that carpets were being beaten directly outside the men's ward, filling the air with dust, while the workhouse laundry was located in a cellar directly below the dining hall, filling the room with foul-smelling steam. Worse still, he had no professional nurses to help him; instead, the more able-bodied elderly female inmates had been recruited to manage the wards and he found that they were often drunk. Finally, Dr Rogers found that he was expected to pay for any medicines the inmates might need out of his own meagre salary.
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| 33 Dean St |
Joseph Rogers was the chief medical officer at the workhouse that we are visiting today. He was also one of the most active and successful reformers of workhouse medicine, founding the Association of London Workhouse Infirmaries and working tirelessly to improve the terrible conditions he found at the Cleveland St institution. His efforts played an important role in forcing Parliament to implement nationwide reforms which radically changed the way state healthcare was provided.
When he arrived at Cleveland St in 1856, Dr Rogers was faced by 20 overcrowded wards filled with dead or dying paupers - in his report he says that 92% of the inmates were ill. In his memoirs, Reminiscences of a Workhouse Medical Officer (a unique historical source which you can read online here), he writes that the workhouse population 'never in my time fell below 500' and an inspection found 556 inmates forced to share 332 beds. Dr Rogers also complained that carpets were being beaten directly outside the men's ward, filling the air with dust, while the workhouse laundry was located in a cellar directly below the dining hall, filling the room with foul-smelling steam. Worse still, he had no professional nurses to help him; instead, the more able-bodied elderly female inmates had been recruited to manage the wards and he found that they were often drunk. Finally, Dr Rogers found that he was expected to pay for any medicines the inmates might need out of his own meagre salary.
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| Dr Joseph Rogers |
Faced with such a hopeless case a lesser man might have given up. But Dr Rogers rose to the challenge. His first act was to relocate the laundry room to a new site in the workhouse yard. When the builders began to dig the foundations they came across an old pauper's burial ground. Shockingly, they had to keep digging down for twenty feet before they came to clear earth. Rogers also enlarged the accommodation provided for sick children, improved the diet given to single mothers and succeeded in ensuring the dismissal of George Catch, the workhouse master, who had been notorious for his bad treatment of the inmates and for obstructing any effort to improve the workhouse.
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| 33 Dean St to the workhouse |
It is an easy ten-minute walk from Dr Rogers' home to Cleveland St and there are several 19th-century buildings along the route. It is a nice thought that the doctor may have seen some of the same sights on his daily commute. That said, I navigated by walking towards the BT Tower, which I'm not sure was a feature of the Georgian skyline...
Walking up Cleveland St past some green boards hiding a very large hole (some major excavation works going on here!) you pass a building on your right with a bright red door. This is a very special spot and I'll return to it shortly. The workhouse itself is a gloomy-looking building of dark brick opposite a pub called the King and Queen.
Cleveland St Workhouse or, to give it its proper name, the Strand Union Workhouse on Cleveland St, was founded in 1775 when Fitzrovia was still mostly fields, to serve the parish of St Paul of Covent Garden. In 1836 it was taken over by the Strand Poor Law Union and in 1873 it became the infirmary for the Central London Sick Asylum District. From 1923-2005 it served as the outpatients' department for Middlesex Hospital, finally closing its doors after 230 years of continual medical care after the hospital it served was demolished. The old workhouse is currently empty.
Camden Council is currently considering demolishing the building to build new social housing. The Cleveland Street Workhouse campaign have created a petition to save the institution and you can sign it - and visit their website for more information on the building's history here. Many thanks to the campaigners for putting together their wonderful presspack - most of the photos of the workhouse buildings used in this post come from them.
The building on Cleveland St has changed its form very little from the original H-shaped structure shown in the earliest plans of the institution. This map (with grateful thanks to workhouses.org.uk) clearly shows how similar the layout in 1870 is to its current appearance, and also helpfully labels the function of each of the buildings.
You can see that by here it is called the Strand Union workhouse (as it had been since 1836) but this earlier plan from 1827, when it was still known as the Covent Garden workhouse, shows that the basic H-shape was original.
Today the workhouse is a forbidding sight. It's getting dark now and the sky is taking on a bruised look. Silhouetted against this it is easy to understand the dread that Georgian and Victorian Londoners felt for this institution. Four-storeys high, surrounded by tall walls and made of dark brick it is not a welcoming building. Modern hoardings have been erected to block the two huge gates but you can still see the metal lettering spelling 'in' and 'out' on each side and the pavement running from the gates to the road is cobbled. I wonder how many thousands of desperate people have walked over these stones and through these gates.
Workhouses were built in every parish under the old Poor Law as a refuge for the destitute. The 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act insisted that these institutions should be as unpleasant as possible in order to dissuade the able-bodied poor from relying on state support rather than working. Those who were able to cope outside the workhouse would do so, while only those who were desperate enough to enter the institution would receive state help.
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| Interior of Cleveland St Workhouse |
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| Rear view of Cleveland St workhouse |
- Food was basic and monotonous, revolving mostly around bread and cheese and a kind of watery porridge called gruel.
- Men, women and children from the same family were split up upon arrival and housed in separate wards with only limited access to each other.
- Inmates had to wear uniforms of rough blue-and-white striped wool. They slept in communal dormitories and had supervised baths once a week.
- All able-bodied inmates were expected to work to earn their keep, and this work was dull and exhausting. Women tended to be given domestic tasks such as helping in the workhouse laundry or kitchen, or cleaning. Men were required to perform manual tasks such as breaking stones for road surfacing, crushing bones for fertiliser (though this was banned following the 1845 Andover Scandal when starving inmates were caught eating the scraps of putrid meat they found clinging to the bones), chopping wood or - in more rural parishes - grinding corn. Both sexes could be ordered to 'pick oakum' - that is, to unravel old tarred ropes which would then be sold to shipbuilders.
- By the end of the 19th century the emphasis was on giving inmates 'useful' (that is, profitable) tasks such as sewing, spinning and weaving, shoemaking, tailoring and bricklaying.
- Inmates worked every day except for Sundays, Good Friday and Christmas Day, when all duties except for cooking and essential cleaning were excused.
I should point out that workhouses were not prisons; inmates were free to come and go as they pleased, for example if work became available locally. However, many paupers spent their lives yoyo-ing back and forth between the workhouse and the outside world. In 1901 a woman is recorded as having been admitted to the City of London workhouse 163 times, while a 40-year-old man had been registered at the Poplar workhouse a staggering 593 times.
Other unfortunates spent much of their lives institutionalised. Many of the people who entered a workhouse did so because they were unable to support themselves at all through work, either because they were elderly, mentally ill, disabled or chronically sick. In 1861 a Parliamentary report found that 20% of inmates nationwide had been in the workhouse for over 5 years while 15 individuals had been there for over 60 years.
An inspection which was published in the medical journal The Lancet highlights how awful conditions in the Cleveland Street workhouse had been. The horrified inspectors write that the 'overcrowding... has been at all times dangerous'. Their report paints a dismal picture of wards full of chronically sick or disabled patients; the vast majority of inmates seem to have been desperately ill. They write that 'deeply saddening is the great mass of indoor pauperism weighted with the additional burden of sickness, too often hopeless as to prospects of cure' and record that 200 inmates were sick and 260 infirm or insane, while less than an eighth were able-bodied.
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| As part of Middlesex Hospital |
Like Dr Rogers, they too condemned the lack of professional nurses, writing that of the elderly pauper women recruited to do the job 'very few can be considered fitted for their work as far regards knowledge and many are incompetent from age or physical feebleness'. The report also says that 'the wards are low-pitched and gloomy... dreadfully hot in summer weather [with] radically defective ventilation. The beds are thin, lumpy and wretched and there are no lavatories or bathrooms attached to the wards'.
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| In the 1930s |
Rather alarmingly the inspectors conclude that 'a greater disproportion between requirements and resources it would be difficult to imagine', yet they conclude that the conditions here are better than in some of the institutions they have seen. I hardly dare to think what other workhouses must have been like.
Dr Rogers is singled out for praise in the report: "It has never in the whole course of our inquiries fallen to our lot to observe a more pointed instance of hard and bitter service by a faithful officer, requited by scanty pay, and persistent opposition on the part of the higher authorities to his conscientious recommendations and exhortations to improvement in the construction, management, and arrangements of the house.
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| Today |
"Besides the large number of patients whom he has to attend to, the medical officer has to dispense the medicines, and he must utterly break down in his duties were it not that he employs his own paid assistant to help him for some hours daily in the performance of the guardians' work. The result of this self-sacrificing conduct is, that although there are necessarily some defects in the medical management of this huge hospital, a nearer approach is made to theoretical perfection in this respect than could possibly have been expected.
"We have already noticed in our general report the useful innovation which Dr. Rogers has induced the guardians to carry out, in the shape of a special dietary for the infirm, itself an enormous boon to a large class of sufferers."
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| In the shadow of the BT tower |
His salary is condemned as 'ridiculous' and the board of guardians in charge of the workhouse come under scathing attack for being 'utterly unconscious or wilfully neglectful of their duties as administrators of a great pauper hospital' and 'exact[ing] a fabulous and impossible task from their miserably underpaid surgeon'.
This report caused public outcry and was one of the major factors contributing to a parliamentary enquiry which ultimately led to the 1867 Metropolitan Poor Act. Under this a Metropolitan Asylum Board was set up, which regulated healthcare for the poor and established its own institutions to treat smallpox, TB and venereal diseases. This Act also oversaw the building of new hospitals and the introduction of professional nurses to all state institutions, and these reforms eventually led to the abolition of the Poor Law and - in 1929 - of the workhouse system itself. The NHS was established in 1948.
You can read much more about the history of workhouses at an amazingly comprehensive website called workhouses.org.uk - this was an invaluable source in putting together this post.
Before we leave Cleveland St, there is one more interesting building we should visit. Nine doors down, at number 22, a rather famous author spent two periods of his life. This building, known then as 10 Norfolk St, was the first London residence of Charles Dickens, who lived here from the age of 3-5, after his family moved from Portsea, near Portsmouth in 1815, and again between 1829-31 when he was in his late teens.
The second time Dickens lived on Cleveland St, during such a formative period of his life, must have had an impact on the young man's awakening social conscience. Dickens would have seen staff and inmates going in and out of the workhouse every day. It is thought that this might have been the building which inspired the workhouse in his most famous novel, Oliver Twist.
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| "Please, Sir... I want some more!" |
Dickens' powerful empathy for the poor is not surprising considering how close he came to being institutionalised himself. The Dickens family were terribly poor, moving house constantly as Charles' father tried to find work and avoid creditors. In the first 21 years of his life Charles Dickens lived at 17 different addresses. His father was ultimately imprisoned in Marshalsea debtors' prison in Southwark and 11-year-old Charles was forced into child labour, sent to work in a blacking factory. This factory was within the Covent Garden parish and it is quite likely that some of his young colleagues had been apprenticed out from the Cleveland Street workhouse.
After this, Dickens must have felt under constant threat of being sent to the workhouse - and in his Cleveland Street home he lived almost literally in its shadow. Small wonder his novels show such strong sympathy for the poorest members of society - Oliver Twist's fate could so easily have been his own.
Scholars debate whether this was indeed the workhouse that inspired Dickens' book but it seems an obvious candidate. The author certainly showed an interest in the institution in his later life; in the 1860s he corresponded with Dr Joseph Rogers, lending his support to the doctor's campaign to improve conditions there. In 1866 he wrote:
"My knowledge of the general condition of the Sick Poor in workhouses is not of yesterday, nor are my efforts in my vocation to call merciful attention to it. Few anomalies in England are so horrible to me as the unchecked existence of many shameful sick wards for paupers, side by side with a constantly recurring expansion of conventional wonder that the poor should creep into corners to die, rather than fester and rot in such infamous places."
Number 22 Cleveland Street stands on the corner of the junction with Tottenham Street. It looks like the lower floor was recently used as a cafe but the shop is now empty with newspapers and whitewash plastered over the windows. It looks very sad and neglected. There is no blue plaque to say that this was the first London home of Charles Dickens - if you didn't know the significance of this building you could walk by without giving it a second glance.
But some signs of its 19th-century life can be seen; a lot of the original architectural features have survived, such as the projecting shop window and the semi-circular window above the front door. The upper storeys are also very typical with their dark brick and sash windows.
Having just given an impromptu history lecture to a group of men outside the King and Queen pub - who wanted to know why I was standing in front of a derelict building scribbling into a notebook - I think it is time to leave Cleveland Street. These men didn't know the significance of the old workhouse or the story of number 22 either - this really does seem to be one of Fitzrovia's best-kept secrets.
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