Charlie Chaplin was educated in one, Charles Dickens famously condemned them, and now the National Trust is opening one to the public.
I pass a homeless man and his dog crouched in a doorway outside King's Cross, and take a train to see how nineteenth century society looked after its poor. The National Trust's latest public offering, opening on 13 March, is the Southwell Workhouse, a 'hospital for the infirm, asylum for the aged, school for the young and a terror for the idle'.
It was built in 1824 to the specifications of Reverend J.T. Becher, and was the prototype for almost 700 similar institutions built across the country in response.
A quarter of a mile outside the small town of Southwell in Nottinghamshire, the workhouse squats 100 yards from the road. It has a wide symmetrical Georgian frontage in warm red brick peering through ancient apple trees; only the many cramped, closely barred windows dispel the illusion of a stately home.
Approaching the side entrance down the same path as poverty-stricken Georgians and Victorians would have, you are herded into a sideroom where - rather than handing over all your belongings and clothes, receiving a wash, workhouse uniform and lecture on the rules and regulations - you hand over your entrance fee and receive an audio guide.
The Poor Law of 1601 determined that each parish was responsible for its own poor. Over the following centuries standard welfare took the form of 'out-relief' - the doling out of bread, money or clothing. Some workhouses were also set up. Many, including the Rev Becher, felt these measures encouraged idleness, and that the institutions, dubbed 'pauper palaces', were too luxurious. Becher felt it imperative to discriminate between 'the innocent and the idle poor', and also believed that 'an empty workhouse is a successful one'.
To this end, the inhabitants were strictly divided into men, women and children, with the adults further split into the 'old and infirm' (or 'blameless poor'), and the 'idle, profligate, immoral and improvident'. Although sharing one building, these were kept as separate communities.
If a family had fallen on hard times, they would be split up, and the last time a husband and wife saw each other was at the door. They could meet only by formal request and under supervision (to prevent 'unnecessary' increases in workhouse numbers).
Up to 200 inhabitants would be looked after by a husband and wife team, the master and matron, who lived in the central section. The rest of the house was split into five entirely discrete sections. Each had a ground-floor day room, dormitories on the floors above, and an outside exercise area. Inside and out, walls separated each section from the neighbouring areas and the outside world. Inhabitants wore steel 'shoed' wooden clogs, and all day the footsteps of other residents rang through the walls.
The workhouse has undergone a £4.5 million overhaul (half of it lottery money) since the National Trust bought it in 1997. It has restored it to a state as close to its mid-nineteenth-century heyday as possible, with austerely decorated rooms, stone flags and white walls, the occasional bench or fireplace. The yards are asphalted with two working manual water pumps. Due partly to the fact that not much workhouse furniture has survived, all the rooms except for a dormitory upstairs have been left unfurnished so, to help your imagination fill in the ghostly building, audioguides provide a dramatic commentary on the function of the house. Written by a radio playwright from the mass of archive material gathered across the country and personal reminiscences, it follows a Poor Law inspector on a surprise visit.
The able-bodied or 'willfully chosen' poor were to be given 'irksome and tedious' work as a disincentive to living off parish money. The women would clean the quarters and cook meals for the fellow inhabitants. The able-bodied men were given many deliberately dull and repetitive tasks, including stone-breaking, oakum picking and bone-crushing to make fertiliser.
The commentary informs us that bone-crushing was finally discontinued following the 1845 scandal at Andover workhouse, Hampshire, when inmates were left so hungry by staff stealing their food that they had resorted to fighting over decaying shreds of meat left on the bones.
Modern nutritionists say that the diet of boiled meat and potatoes, with gruel on alternate days, would be 'sufficient' (although for what they do not say). I'd recommend that the trust keeps some gruel on the boil so that visitors can judge for themselves.
Children would have accounted for about half of the inhabitants, and while most would have been orphaned or disowned, the remainder would have been separated from parents living in another section who, as 'undeserving poor', were considered a bad influence. However, the children at Southwell would at least have been given an education in the three Rs by a professional teacher.
The spick and span building can barely hint at the cramped listlessness of workhouse life, and this is where the informative audio-guides come into their own.
Games seem to have been prohibited, as one scored into an exercise yard wall out of the sightline from the master's room proves. Also scratched into the walls, and even more telling, is the marking of the passage of time, for this was not a prison and residents were allowed to leave. Becher's bullish decree that 'those in need will accept the workhouse, those not, will not', is inaccurate: endure would be a better word.
That the workhouses lasted for so long is testament to their utility. Even after the welfare state reforms of 1948, Southwell remained a home for the poor - albeit under the more friendly name of Greet House - and one upstairs room has been furnished as it would have been in the Seventies: a bedsit housing a family of five.
The last two rooms in the house have been set up as interactive exhibits to contextualise the workhouse phenomenon for the visitor. 'Hands on History' includes artifacts such as the sieve through which a worker's rock chippings had to pass, a paddle (used to correct naughty children), a database in which you can search out your local workhouse, and trust volunteers with whom you can debate the pros and cons of this paradoxical combination of care and deterrence. 'What Now, What Next?' gives an analysis of poverty relief and asks the visitor to think about how the workhouse compares to our current welfare state.
The National Trust has been criticised in the past for preserving the history of only the titled classes. Fiona Reynolds, who joined as director general last year, vowed to concentrate on 'downstairs rather than upstairs'.
So does the opening of Southwell Workhouse, and the recent acquisition of some back-to-back slum housing in Birmingham, herald a new direction? Susanna Smith, manager of Southwell Workhouse, believes rescuing buildings under threat drives policy as much as ideology.
'Some visitors from the Czech Republic couldn't understand why we would preserve such a building, as they still have places like it,' she said. 'But it's because we don't that we feel the need to.'
Either way, Southwell Workhouse brings to life a misery that had hitherto been confined to textbooks, Dickens and the memories of a dying generation.
Factfile
The Workhouse: Upton Road, Southwell, Nottinghamshire (01636 817250).
Opens 13 March to3 November daily (except Monday and Tuesday) 12am-5pm. Admission adult £4, child £2, family £10.
