Oliver Twist landmark, the Strand Union Workhouse saved

Published: 17th March, 2011
by JOSH LOEB

SCHOLARS have praised the government for saving a threatened workhouse thought to have inspired Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist.

The Strand Union Workhouse in Cleveland Street, Fitzrovia, has been the subject of a three-year-long tussle between the building’s owner, University College London Hospital (UCLH) and heritage campaigners desperate for it to be preserved.

UCLH had planned to demolish the workhouse and build social housing, but the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) this week granted it Grade II-listed status.

Heritage minister John Penrose said the building was an “eloquent reminder of one of the grimmer aspects of London’s 18th-century social history”.

Built in the 1770s, the workhouse was the final port of call for many desperately poor inhabitants of Fitzrovia in Georgian and Victorian times. Mothers unable to afford to bring up children dumped babies at the doors of the building and the orphans were given accommodation and hard labour. 

At the back of the workhouse an estimated 1,000 bodies are buried, and it is said to have inspired the young Dickens, who lived close by. 

A spokesman for UCLH said: “We are convinced that this location is appropriate to provide much-needed social housing to support the regeneration of the Fitzrovia area and are working with English Heritage, Camden Council and our advisers to find a solution which will be agreeable to the planning authorities.”