The workhouse was once the last place anyone would want to set foot. These miserable, disease-ridden hellholes were dumping grounds for the destitute in Victorian England (and lasted well into the 20th century). In exchange for manual labour, vagrants received crude shelter and food.
The Workhouse Museum in Ripon, North Yorkshire, housed in the town’s original institution, is compelling. There’s a spooky automaton in the entrance hall. In the schoolroom, children can put on a dunce’s cap. The porcelain rolltop bathtubs look chic: I found myself posting a picture on Instagram. Fun aside, the museum also does an excellent job of explaining the brutality within the red-brick walls.
So I was surprised by a sign on a noticeboard in a dismal corridor lined with the bare cells in which vagrants were once incarcerated. It read: “Do you think workhouses were a good idea?”