A History of the Brighton Workhouses

The spectre of the workhouse haunted the old, the sick, the unemployed, the young and the vulnerable.  Its buildings were not symbols of civic pride to adorn urban centres, but were cheap, bleak, grimly austere and oppressive to the poor, and usually on the edge of town, much like the last standing Brighton workhouse in Elm Grove (now Brighton General Hospital).  It superseded the workhouse at Church Hill, north of St Nicholas’s church.  From 1862 Brighton’s pauper children were sent to Warren Farm Industrial Schools in Woodingdean – so isolated an area that contemporaries referred to it as “East America”.  

James Gardner will present the history of Brighton’s workhouses and give a voice to those men, women and children who found themselves as inmates.