The Workhouse Network brings together museums, heritage organisations, archives and universities interested in welfare history. |
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We have created a new section on the website entitled Publications. Members of the Workhouse Network have written books and produced academic publications about the workhouse buildings the, staff and inmates they have been researching. Why not take a look and see what is available and discover how workhouse research can be used to bring hidden histories to the fore? |
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The Workhouse Network is proud to present Care Conversations. During the pandemic, we have been all working with so many of the issues that are raised in the history of the workhouse system including segregation, categorisation, public health, social care systems, impacts of poverty and homelessness on health, and inequality of access to health support, including mental health. The pre-existing contemporary inequalities and poverty that Covid 19 has revealed have deep resonance in the history of the workhouse system, the Poor Law Commission and Local Government Board and early social/welfare care systems. Care Conversations brings together volunteer researchers from The Workhouse Network with people who are involved in the social care system today either as workers, carers, parents, or managers. In the first session of Conversations Jessica Turtle from The Museum of Homelessness will begin our first session, followed by Belinda May and Jim Mortram talking about their own experience of caring for family and how the historic record reflects that experience In the second session of Conversations the Workhouse Network Chair, Jan Overfield-Shaw chats with Rachel Sharpe and Julie Kirk about learning disability and attitudes and experiences of working and parenting with the current system. In the third session of Conversations Laura Drysdale and Richard Johnson of the Restoration Trust and Change Minds project speak about mental health and the healing properties of historic research. |
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In our new digital exhibition, More Than Oliver Twist, experience, through audio and visual interpretation, the stories of people from 1881, alongside a set of contemporary responses to these histories by people who experienced the welfare and institutions of today.
Explore over 300 of these biographies of the poor in the largest known free, online database of biographies of the poor. |
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Our ProjectsMore Than Oliver Twist, 2019 -2021
The More Than Oliver Twist project provided training for six workhouse sites to research the lives of inmates in their institutions in the 1881 census. From this research, they created a digital exhibition, More Than Oliver Twist. The project is funded by Arts Council England and supported by Nottingham Trent University and The National Archives. |
Photo credits: St. James', Leeds
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