FORUM: The Strand Union Workhouse facing demolition

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Published: 8 October, 2010

THE Strand Union Workhouse building in Cleveland Street, Fitzrovia, is facing demolition – but local
historian Ruth Richardson says its dark history means it deserves to be preserved

The Middlesex Hospital is now a pile of rubble, but if you walk northwards along Cleveland Street in Fitzrovia you might still be able to glimpse the outpatients’ department, standing quietly behind its own high wall and some newer hoardings.

Many patients and staff used the building without a second thought about its history, and most passers-by probably do the same today. But if they only knew its story, they would be fascinated.

The building is older than any other left standing nearby.

It was originally a workhouse, and dates from long before Oliver Twist.

It was built in the 1770s, when Captain Cook was busy charting the coast of Australia and Fitzrovia was still mostly fields.

The parish of St Paul Covent Garden obtained the use of a distant pasture for a new workhouse to house its sick, elderly and poor parishioners.

The parish churchyard being full, land was consecrated for burial of those who died there.

The original ‘H’ plan stands out clearly on maps from each of the four centuries the building has stood – the 18th, 19th, 20th and now, in the 21st, you can see it in the satellite pictures on Google, opposite the lovely King and Queen pub.

The building has a wonderful history, which is also terrible – but above all, it is important.

The place is unique in being a purpose-built Georgian workhouse in continuous use as a facility for the sick poor of London for over 230 years.

If the walls of the building could speak, they would have a tale to tell. Under the Victorian Poor Law, Covent Garden merged with other parishes to become the Strand Poor Law Union, and the place became terribly overcrowded.

When the reformer Dr Joseph Rogers became the medical officer there in the 1850s, he found all 20 wards full of ill and dying people. Only eight per cent were well.

A survey by The Lancet in 1866 found 556 people sharing only 332 beds.

Rogers was expected to pay for all medicines out of his meagre salary of only £50 a year. He worked with a passion for his own patients, treated them as human beings, and campaigned to change the Victorian Poor Law.

Rogers argued that it was wrong to punish people for being sick, wrong to starve new mothers and wrong to force whole families into the workhouse when the breadwinner fell ill.

Other reformers, like Florence Nightingale and Louisa Twining, supported his efforts to get trained nurses into workhouses.

Before his death in 1889, Rogers had the pleasure of seeing things greatly altered, and new infirmaries erected across Britain.

In London, such hospital sites – like the Whittington, North Middlesex and the Chelsea & Westminster – still serve NHS patients today.

The old Strand workhouse is a robust building, built to last. It was 175 years old when it survived the Blitz, and has seen out many a younger building in the neighbourhood.

Now Camden Council planners are being asked to vote for its demolition.

An uninteresting high-rise block is planned for the old site.

The council and the developers seem unconcerned about the history of the place – but lovers of old London and historians have come together to fight for its preservation.

The planners have been deluged with letters and emails and will have to sit up and take note.

You can check out Poor Law history at www.workhouses.org – and while you’re there you can sign the petition!

• Ruth Richardson is the author of The Making of Mr Gray’s Anatomy (Oxford University Press).She will be giving a talk on Bodysnatching in Hampstead, at Hampstead Churchyard on November 6.