Over 600 of these Dickensian semi-prisons were built following the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act which aimed to make life much harder for the able-bodied poor. Three workhouses were built in 1066 country, in Hastings, Battle and Rye, and large parts of all these buildings still survive, but now as housing.
Before 1834 the poor had been looked after quite well by the local parish, using taxes paid by the people in that parish, who could see who genuinely needed help. This started with the 1601 Act for the Relief of the Poor, which made parishes legally responsible for looking after their own paupers. This was funded by parish overseers collecting a poor-rate tax from local property owners (the origin of today’s council tax). The overseers initially gave assistance in the form of ‘out relief’ – grants of money, food, clothes etc to people in their own homes.
However, the workhouse (first known as the ‘poor house’) had emerged by the early 18th century as an alternative form of aid. Known initially as ‘indoor relief’, it both tried to save the taxpayers money, and to act as a deterrent to the able-bodied unemployed, who were required to work, usually without pay, in return for board and lodging.
The 1723 Workhouse Test Act gave parishes more powers to run these ‘houses of correction’, and in 1753 the overseers of the parishes of All Saints, St Clements and St Mary-in-the-Castle decided to build a shared workhouse. This opened in 1754 at the west end of George, and paupers were transferred there from the three old parish poor houses.
But the new system did not cut the costs of relief, as was hoped by the well-off parishioners, and rates soon went up significantly. So in 1773 the three parishes decided to have separate workhouses. In the eastern half of the town, in All Saints parish, the first workhouse was125 All Saints Street, now an attractive cottage. The impoverished folk of the west half of the town - the parish of St Clements - had to go to a building at the far end of George Street, where 42 George Street stands today. Two centuries ago this was the west end of town, with the sea almost coming up to the cliffs - and as far away as possible for the better off residents of St Clements, who lived mainly in the High Street and Croft Road. The parish of St Mary-in-the-Castle was then nearly all farmland with few people seeking relief, and it had a small workhouse at Baldslow.
About 1820, number 137 Old London Road took over as the All Saints parish workhouse, standing in what was once the Springfield Nursery, opposite the bottom of Robertsons Hill.
The 1820s saw growing poverty and unemployment across Britain, and the cost of poor relief escalated, with large amounts being given in out-relief. Then in the winter of 1830/31 there was a major revolt amongst agricultural labourers – the Captain Swing riots - which frightened the nation’s establishment into rethinking the whole poor relief and workhouse system. The uprising was conducted in a highly organised but covert manner, modelled on smuggling and the French Revolution. This, and the large amounts of taxes being given in out-relief, galvanised the government into immediately carrying out a major inquiry into why the poor laws seemed to actually help the near-revolution by the English working class.
The 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act clamped down much harder on the lower levels of British society. Rather than give food and money to the unemployed at home, who could then plot another Captain Swing revolt from their living rooms, it was decided to force them to go into a new and much tougher form of workhouse. All able-bodied persons who sought relief would be given it - but only within a prison-like workhouse. Many preferred to starve rather than be subjected to such denigration.
The 1834 Act forced the country’s 15,000 parishes to merge into 643 ‘unions’, with each having its own workhouse, about 10 miles from the next. The Hastings Union was formed at a meeting in 137 Old London Road in July 1835. Its members were all the parishes roughly within the current borough boundary, plus Fairlight and Guestling. The Ore poor house was then in Ore Village, a few yards to the east of where the clinic is today, and St Mary-in-the-Castle’s was on the site of 12-16 Wellington Place.
The new Hastings Union Workhouse opened in July 1837. On its first day, the old parish workhouses transferred 160 paupers, half of them from Hastings Old Town. This stark, forbidding building was the biggest in Hastings. It was on the site of a chicken farm on the north-east side of Cackle Street – now Frederick Road – in Ore Valley, and dominated life in Ore up until recent times. Much of it still survives, as flats.
Nearly all of Battle Union Workhouse is still standing, forming the 13 residences of Frederick Thatcher Place on the North Trade Road, near the Netherfield junction. There were very few houses on the North Trade Route when the union was formed in 1835, covering 14 parishes. The workhouse was built in 1840 for 440 inmates, becoming in 1948 the Battle Hospital. It is now named after the Hastings-born designer of the workhouse.
Rye Union was created in 1835 for 12 parishes, and the workhouse opened in Playden in1845 for 436 inmates. In 1949 it became Hill House Hospital, closing in c1980. The workhouse’s main building still survives, as houses in Hillcrest.