Building by Government II: Workhouses

Ireland’s workhouses

Frank Keohane

The workhouse at Mallow was erected in 1840-41 on the outskirts of the town. Planned to accommodate up to 700 inmates, it was built at a cost of £6,090 with a further £1,160 expended on fitting it out. While it was ready for reception of paupers in November 1841, the first admissions were only received in August 1842 – a not uncommon circumstance where a poor law union had failed to levy sufficient rates to cover operating costs. The complex followed a standardised layout with an entrance/administration block, behind which stood the main accommodation block with the master’s quarters to the centre and quarters for male and female inmates to either side (10.1).

Irish workhouses owe their origins to the Poor Law Amendment Act (1834) which provided for the construction of 350 workhouses in England and Wales. Prior to this, poor relief had been provided at an individual parish level, a system that was regarded as inefficient and open to abuse. Henceforth, relief would only be offered to those paupers who were prepared to submit themselves (and their families) to the workhouse regime, so-called indoor relief with its strict daily routine and rigorous segregation and classification of inmates.

In 1833 a Royal Commission was established to investigate the conditions of the poorer classes in Ireland. It found that the provision of indoor relief as applied in England and Wales would be unsuited to Irish conditions where the problem was a lack of available work and the need for investment in large scale public works. However, George Nicholls, one of the Poor Law Commissioner, produced a supplementary report advocating the extension of the indoor relief system to Ireland. In 1838, with the passing of the Act for the More Effectual Relief of the Destitute Poor, the country was divided into 130 poor law unions, each of which was to have a workhouse.

While in England and Wales individual poor law unions had responsibility for the construction of workhouses, including the appointment of architects, in Ireland, a different approach was taken. At first, the Poor Law Commissioners proposed that the Board of Works would be responsible for the design and construction of the proposed workhouses, but this proved impossible for legal reasons. The Commissioners then invited three architects to submit designs for a model workhouse. On foot of this, the twenty-four year old George Wilkinson was appointed official architect to the Poor Law Commissioners in January 1839.

The appointment of a single architect for all of the workhouses caused much consternation amongst Irish architects. Having failed to persuade Jacob Owen, architect to the Board of Works, to intercede on their behalf, they founded a professional body, the Institute of Architects in August 1839 for the purpose of protecting their professional rights and standing. (The Institute became the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland in 1840, and today is more commonly known as the RIAI.)

The physical arrangement and form of Irish workhouses also differed to those built by Wilkinson in England. There, most were arranged on a cruciform plan with a central polygonal supervisory hub and radiating wings, a pattern much used in contemporaneous prisons. Irish workhouses were generally built to house larger numbers of inmates, usually 500-800 beds in contrast to 200-300 in England. Given the scale of the task before him, and having only a single assistant, Wilkinson relied on printed lithograph sheets for details (10.3). These could be supplemented with hand drawn plans and elevations to suit each site. While Wilkinson’s modular format could be adapted to suit the required number of beds in each poor law union, a standardised arrangement prevailed where inmates of all ages were segregated by sex, males generally to the right and females to the left side. At the front of the complex stood a two-storey entrance block containing a porter’s lodge and receiving rooms. Behind this stood a much larger and more imposing block at the centre of which was accommodation for the workhouse master and matron. To either side schoolrooms for children were provided on the ground floor with the children’s dormitories above. The taller end blocks accommodated adult males and females. Behind the main block, further ranges contained a dining hall, which doubled as a chapel, kitchens and laundries, an infirmary, and ‘wards for idiots’. The open spaces between the different buildings were used as segregated exercise yards.

Contemporary reactions to Wilkinson’s workhouses were less than favourable. George Nicholls described them as being ‘of the cheapest description compatible with durability… effect was sought to be obtained through harmony of proportion and simplicity of arrangement; all mere decoration being studiously excluded’. Nonetheless they represent a remarkable achievement in delivery of public infrastructure. By April 1843, Wilkinson could report that 112 workhouses were finished and all 130 were complete by 1847 at an overall cost in excess of £1 million, an enormous sum at that time and representing the largest concerted building campaign undertaken by the state to that date. During the famine there was a need for additional accommodation and fever hospitals were added to many workhouses. Between 1849 and 1853, thirty more workhouses were built under the direction of Wilkinson, although to a different design and layout (10.4).

Wilkinson was responsible for selecting and approving sites for the workhouses as well as inspecting the works across the island of Ireland. This was a Herculean task in the days before rapid transport by railways. Wilkinson did not have a good opinion of Irish brick and instead specified the use of local building stones. In 1845 he published Practical Geology and Ancient Architecture of Ireland. This was the first comprehensive survey of building stones in Ireland and included findings of the experiments he conducted on the stones he employed during the workhouse building campaign.

In September 1855, the Poor Law Commissioners decided they no longer needed a permanent architect and George Wilkinson retired from the post on a pension of £300 at the age of 41. He then set up in independent practice working predominantly with railways and to a lesser extent lunatic asylums. Wilkinson returned to England in 1887 and died in 1890.

It was hardly Wilkinson’s fault that the workhouses he designed were unsuited to the particularities of Ireland, and were entirely unable to cope with the impact of the Famine. And it is unsurprising, given their purpose, that the Tudor idiom he employed did little to endear them to local populations. However, Wilkinson’s buildings did prove versatile and Mallow, like many others, was adapted as a hospital towards the end of the nineteenth century. It was replaced by a new hospital complex in 1936, though parts of the original structure remain. Many of these buildings have been completely demolished but others endure, some derelict but some still in use, repurposed as community facilities, schools, or cultural centres (10.5).

Frank Keohane is a chartered building surveyor, architectural historian and author specialising in the conservation of period homes and historic buildings.