Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse

Today we visited Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse, a museum set in an old Victorian workhouse.  Fascinating to look around but also quite depressing to see the life that the poor had to have if their only choice was to enter the workhouse.  In fact, the life was better for them than it would have been before the workhouses were set up, but it was still a pretty grim existence.

These were not prisons; people could enter and leave them as they wished under certain conditions, but most who entered had no other choice in life and it certainly had the feel of a prison about it.  The photo shows the female exercise yard; the few families who lived there were separated from the start and only got to see each other very briefly on Sundays, to prevent the possibility of new workhouse residents being created.  The men's exercise yard was on the other side of the wall and these two statues depict two of the female residents.  The one I've put in the extra depicts a lady who was punished by a day in a solitary cell for throwing some bread over the wall for her 12 year old son to eat.

The linked farm museum was interesting.  There were sheep, goats and pigs, a very grumpy turkey and six Suffolk Punch horses.  Two of the horses are in the second extra.