Visitors to one of Britain’s most complete surviving Victorian workhouses will not have to strip and bathe in someone else’s bath water, but they may be offered gruel, sweep the yard and hear “schoolmaster” volunteers telling children how to behave. The revamped Ripon attraction reopened after a £2.8m redevelopment designed to make its story of poverty and welfare more immersive and more immediate.
The museum asks visitors whether they would have survived the Victorian workhouse, and leads them through spaces intended to evoke the experience of paupers and vagrants. Director of the Ripon Trust Alexa Vernon said visitors would be “literally” following in the footsteps of people who experienced the place.
“You are literally going to walk in the footsteps of people who have experienced this place,”
She added that the museum could not serve gruel every day, but that children would be able to sew, hunt for mice and listen to the sounds of the building, with the hope that they might understand how fortunate they are compared with Victorian children.
“I’m not sure we can serve gruel every day, but children will be able to get stuck into sewing and hunt for mice and listen to the sounds, and they might realise how lucky they are compared to Victorian children.”
The redesign includes volunteers who may be baking bread or putting clothes through a mangle, helping create a more immersive sense of daily life in the workhouse.
As visitors enter the vagrants’ block, they hear unpleasant coughing and encounter baths, a one-size-fits-all coarse men’s nightshirt and a reproduction “de-infestor” used to fumigate paupers’ and vagrants’ clothes. The museum is intended to ask whether people could survive the harsh routines and rules of the Victorian institution.
“All their possessions would be taken from them,”
“They would be stripped. They would be bathed. If you were lucky you would be the first person in the bath water. If you were unlucky, you were the third.”
Curator Laura Allan said the history also resonates with current patterns of homelessness, noting that the causes have changed little over time.
“It’s interesting that the reasons people became homeless in the past are very similar as today – so alcoholism, mental health, family breakdown, veterans returning from war.”
Elsewhere in the museum, visitors can shut themselves in a vagrants’ cell, pick oakum from old ropes or pose for a family portrait in replica workhouse uniforms. These displays are part of the effort to make the building’s history feel less distant and more tangible to the public.
The museum reopens to the public on Tuesday after major conservation and restoration work supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. It became a museum in 2017 and tells the story of the Victorian solution to poverty and homelessness: giving people a bed and food while making conditions as grim, unpleasant and rules-bound as possible.
Vernon said the building itself was in urgent need of repair before the redevelopment. She described serious structural and maintenance problems, including rotting window frames, a leaking roof, water damage, faulty wiring and unsupported arches.
“You could honestly stick a screwdriver in the rotting window frames and it would stand up independently,” she said.
“The roof was leaking. We had water damage throughout. The wiring was like spaghetti junction. We had unsupported arches. Our structural engineer said that technically the building shouldn’t stand up.”
Before the work, the museum experience was also less polished, with the layout and interpretation resembling former office space rather than a fully developed exhibition. The site had once been office space for social services, and Vernon said some visitors commented that it looked unfinished.
“Some of our Tripadvisor comments were along the lines of … it looks like they’ve not finished it,” Vernon said. “It wasn’t finished.”
The lottery funding has changed not only the building’s fabric but also the interpretation of its spaces. In addition to fixing the roof, windows and walls, it has restored the museum’s original colour palette of taupes, pinks and greens.
One of the most significant additions has been access to the cellar, where meat was slaughtered and stored. Curators believe the space was probably last opened in the 1930s and say it remains the only area that has never really been altered.
“This space, we think, was probably last opened in the 1930s,” said Allan.
“This is probably exactly how it would have looked when it was a workhouse. It’s the only space that really has never been touched.”
The museum’s purpose is broader than Ripon itself, Vernon said. She described the story as a national one because workhouses were found throughout the country and represented the Victorian answer to poverty.
“This is a national story,”
“Workhouses have an important story to tell about poverty, welfare and justice and there were workhouses up and down the country.
“This was the Victorian solution to poverty.”
The revamped museum is one of three in Ripon that present vivid accounts of Victorian life. The others are a courthouse museum and a prison and police museum, each offering historical narratives that curators believe continue to matter today.
Vernon said the museum’s story has contemporary relevance because poverty remains a present-day issue, and visitors are encouraged to reflect on how society treats vulnerable people.
“Poverty still exists, doesn’t it,” said Vernon.
“People can come here and think about poverty, think about how we treat people and think about whether we are treating people more fairly now.”
She hopes visitors leave with a deeper understanding of the people who lived and worked in the institution, and with a stronger sense of empathy.
“but also more compassionate, thoughtful and connected to the stories of those who came before us”.
