Welcome to the first post in our series of 60 posts celebrating 60 years of the London Borough of Camden. Our first post is by Camden Guide Richard Cohen.
On the south-western edge of the borough of Camden on the border between Fitzrovia and Marylebone stands a historic building which served the poor and infirm of Central London for more than 230 years. It is now undergoing redevelopment by the University College Hospital Charity. It is the only surviving example of a Georgian Workhouse in London and is the likely inspiration for that most memorable scene in Dickens’ Oliver Twist when the young hero asks for more gruel.
Origins
The land on which the old workhouse stands was leased from the Bedford Estate and had been used as the overspill burial ground for St Paul’s Church on Covent Garden Piazza. The Workhouse was built in the 1770s as an H-shaped block fronting onto Cleveland St with wings at front and rear. It took in those of the parish who could not provide for their families or pay their rent due to sickness, injury or infirmity and offered them accommodation and employment. As London’s population grew the ancient parish-based system became unworkable and reform was needed.
The Spike
Change came in the form of the New Poor Law enacted in 1834 which set up the massive workhouse institutions (aka spikes) which still cast a shadow over many towns and cities across the country. Conditions were intended to be harsh as a deterrent to idleness and to ensure that only the truly destitute would apply. Families were broken up and in exchange for spartan sleeping accommodation and subsistence diets the inmates of the spike were expected to work brutally long hours on menial tasks. Jobs included street-sweeping, stone-breaking, gypsum- grinding for plaster, oakum-picking (teasing grease out of old ropes) and laundry work. The plight of orphaned or deserted children was particularly awful – they were starved, punished, used as a cheap labour or as tools by criminals. Often, they were farmed out to ruthless employers to form labour gangs.
Charles Dickens and the Workhouse
All this would have been engraved on the fertile mind of the young author who knew this part of London well from his days at 22 Cleveland Street just 100 yards away. It is marked by the plaque just above. Dickens would have seen the comings and goings from the workhouse and heard the bell which marked out the hours for rising, working, eating and sleeping for the inmates. His second sojourn in the street came in his teenage years soon after his time working at the blacking factory at Hungerford Steps (near the modern Charing Cross Station). At that time his father had been in a debtors’ prison and the sensitive youngster may have imagined that he himself might well have suffered the same fate as his poor unfortunate neighbours in the workhouse – the sick, the orphaned, the elderly and infirm, the chronically ill or incurable, physically deformed, diseased, maimed, lunatic, demented or mentally handicapped. No wonder Dickens goes into such close detail when he describes the sadistic punishments meted out onto poor Oliver for the effrontery of asking for more gruel. The regulations of Covent Garden Parish specifically forbade second helpings of food. Oliver is maligned, threatened with being hanged, drawn and quartered; he is starved, caned, and flogged before an audience of paupers, solitarily confined in the dark for days, kicked and cursed, hauled up before a magistrate and sent to work for an undertaker, fed on animal scraps, taunted, and forced to sleep with coffins.
The Strand Union Workhouse
As the workhouse reforms took effect a few years later Cleveland Street was reorganised and expanded combining the work of several other West End parishes including St Anne’s Soho, St Clement Danes, St Mary-le-Strand and St Martin in the Fields and it became known as the Strand Union Workhouse in 1836. The problems of overcrowding and infection only intensified and conditions remained appalling with ample opportunity for abuse by corrupt overseers and untrained nurses. Into this situation stepped a great Victorian reformer, Dr Joseph Rogers who worked passionately to improve the medical care of the indigent poor. Rogers became Medical Officer in 1856. At that time there were no workhouse infirmaries; nursing of the sick was done by untrained women selected by the matron and rewarded for their work by extra rations and given gin for laying out the dead. These nurses often drunk before noon. Infection was rife in the squalid wards where beds were so close together that patients had to get out at the ends. He tried to introduce basic hygiene. Regulating the supply of medicines was another battle. Over years of campaigning, enlisting the support of the great and the good, including Florence Nightingale and Charles Dickens, it was Rogers’ influence that got the Metropolitan Poor Act through Parliament in 1867. This required local authorities to provide new infirmaries separate from the workhouses. It was these infirmaries established under this progressive legislation that form the inner core of many of our modern NHS hospitals in London today.
Another great figure in the story of the Strand Union was the formidable Louisa Twining (shown above). After visiting the workhouse in 1853 she conceived the idea of establishing a group of local ladies who could visit to pray and converse with residents. Her visits exposed the neglect of the inmates at Cleveland Street and led to the founding of the Workhouse Visiting Society in 1858. It became a powerful voice in the campaign to humanise these austere institutions. In 1879 she became secretary of the Association for Promoting Trained Nursing in Workhouse Infirmaries and Sick Asylums which worked hard to ensure that there were professional standards of nursing care in the new infirmaries.
From 1873 the building was known as the Central London Sick Asylum. The workhouse was relocated to North Edmonton and the Cleveland Street site became an infirmary, effectively a hospital for the poor. This continued till 1913. A children’s infirmary then ran on the site for ten years.
After the Great War the site was taken over by the nearby Middlesex Hospital, one of London’s great medical institutions which stood just across the street on the site now occupied by the new high-end Pearson Square development. The facilities were updated and the building played a vital role in the rebuilding of the hospital which decanted in stages across the road as the old Middlesex building was demolished and reconstructed. After that the building saw 75 years use as the Middlesex Out-Patients’ wing. The Middlesex finally closed in 2006 and was demolished. The Cleveland Street site was spared and stood empty to await a new incarnation.
Here is the developer’s image of the new development.
Initially the developers pressed for demolition of this useful central London site but there was strong local resistance and a campaign to have it listed as a building of historic interest. It took more than 10 years for a plan to be agreed. Eventually the University College Hospital Charitable trust, who had inherited the assets of the Middlesex, and were keen to put the site to constructive and profitable use came up with a plan in 2017. This was for a mixed-use structure of retail and office space, combined with a large block at the back of the preserved Georgian façade which would provide 25 residential units. The front has been transformed into a development called Fitzroy Walk with two townhouses and 13 luxury apartments.