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Children are eating gruel, washing clothes and chasing mice in Britain.
They’re young visitors to the newly reopened Workhouse Museum of Ripon, in northern England. The interactive museum occupies an actual Victorian workhouse, an English institution that promised work and shelter for impoverished people in the 19th century yet sometimes functioned as a sort of prison. It aims to show visitors the reality of such workhouses, which were reputed for child labor, malnutrition and abuse.
“You are literally going to walk in the footsteps of people who have experienced this place,” Alexa Vernon, director of the Ripon Museum Trust, tells the Guardian’s Mark Brown.
Workhouses, also known as poorhouses, were immortalized in Victorian literature like Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. They became especially prevalent in the mid-1800s. The Ripon Union Workhouse, which is now the Workhouse Museum, was built in 1855. It replaced an even older poorhouse on the site, which in 1832 housed 33 “inmates” who worked for eight hours per day breaking stones for paving roads.
What kinds of people lived in the Ripon Union Workhouse? The “houseless poor,” also known as vagrants and paupers. The former were allowed only one two-night stay per month, while the latter were given long-term residency. They were the unemployed, the unlucky, the downtrodden. As curator Laura Allan tells the Guardian, “It’s interesting that the reasons people became homeless in the past are very similar to today—so, alcoholism, mental health, family breakdown, veterans returning from war.”
In 1861, Ripon Union’s residents included 24 children under the age of 12, one of them an infant, and old or widowed men who’d previously worked as a wheelwright, shoemaker, butcher and farmer.
Visitors to the new museum can experience something of what it was like to arrive at the workhouse as a vagrant. They tour the meager washrooms, see the equipment that fumigated clothing, and walk through cells where people had to sleep.
“All their possessions would be taken from them,” Allan tells the Guardian. “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.”
Sound effects play throughout the house, bringing the place to life, Vernon tells BBC News’ Emily Johnson and Olivia Richwald: “In the cells you can hear people groaning and coughing; in the kitchen you can hear the bustle.”
Life at the Ripon Union Workhouse involved chopping firewood, doing laundry, growing vegetables and other tasks. Museum volunteers dressed in period costumes illustrate daily life, like baking bread in the kitchen, reports Museums Association’s Rebecca Atkinson. When groups of children visit, retired teacher Nick Baird portrays a workhouse schoolteacher.
“I tend to be quite fierce for the first few minutes but I can’t keep it up,” Baird tells BBC News. He says children “were expected to be silent at all times and march along in single file, especially in a workhouse situation. … Discipline was very strict and it wasn’t a desperately pleasant environment for them.”
Along with sitting in a classroom, young visitors to the museum can also find fake mice in the kitchen, help do laundry, sew and occasionally sample some gruel—a period-appropriate tasteless porridge. Vernon tells the Guardian, “They might realize how lucky they are compared to Victorian children.”
The Workhouse Museum closed for a renovation this summer while workers fixed the old building’s wiring, roof, window frames and structural issues. The project cost more than $3.7 million.
Vernon hopes visitors to the newly restored museum will be able to immerse themselves in the “Victorian solution to poverty,” she tells the Guardian. “Workhouses have an important story to tell about poverty, welfare and justice.”
This article was originally published on Smithsonian Magazine. Read the full story here: Kids Can Try Out the 'Oliver Twist' Lifestyle at This English Museum Revealing Conditions for Poor People in a Victorian Workhouse © 2026 Smithsonian Institution.
