Fight to protect old workhouse burial ground
The tragic history of suffering at Bath’s Union Workhouse has come back into the spotlight this week as the institution’s mass graveyards and gothic chapel have been listed by the Local Plan as “available and suitable for development”.
The workhouse, which is now part of St Martin’s Hospital in Odd Down, was designed by Sampson Kempthorne “to hold up to 500 paupers” and opened in 1838.
An unimaginable 4,292 poor residents are recorded as having died there and been buried in mass graves: 1,111 within the workhouse property and 3,181 in the graveyard extension off Radstock Road.
“The workhouse is a place of huge importance in the history of the city of Bath where those who built the city came when they fell on hard times,” said Dr Jon Moon, a local resident who has been campaigning to save the grounds.
The residents of the workhouse included craftspeople who built some of Bath’s iconic buildings as well as women, babies, children and many orphans.
“These were the people who quarried the Bath stone that the city crescents were built from. Here they faced a hard existence and after death were buried in unmarked communal graves, several bodies deep. Many of the descendants of the workhouse inmates buried at St Martin’s still live in Bath,” he said.
Not every child growing up in the workhouse died there, however. The archive of the Bath Board of Guardians lists four girls, Eliza Arnold, Caroline Coleman, Matilda Hall and Marianne Atkins, who were separated forever from their families and sent on a one way journey to Perth, Australia, to relieve the burden on the public purse.
In August 1852, Matilda signed the statement: “I am 14 years old and am now residing in the Bath Union Workhouse - I am desirous of being sent to Western Australia as an emigrant at the expense of the parish of Walcot,” and so she was transported to the other side of the world.
The Bath Chronicle of Thursday, July 29, 1847 reported on the inauguration of the mass graveyard: “At half-past three o’clock, the Bishop proceeded to the Union Workhouse and consecrated a piece of ground for the interment of such poor persons as may die within the house,” wrote our reporter with little sympathy.
“Thus the inconvenience of removing the bodies to different parishes will in future be obviated.”
The majestic Grade II listed chapel which has the year it was built, 1846, carved in stone over the western door is still consecrated but currently derelict and the site is at risk of development.
“The consecrated burial ground needs to be kept as a local amenity green space open to the community,” said Dr Moon. “The listed, consecrated chapel, built by a workhouse inmate buried in the site, deserves to be restored, preserved and used. Its future could be as a community centre, museum and even a place for marriage. The chapel and burial ground must not be blighted by inappropriate property development.”
Bath MP Wera Hobhouse has written to the prospective property developer Colburn Homes and to NHS Properties asking that the site remain undisturbed.
“I have launched a petition to save this important site that is of special significance to Bath’s collective heritage,” she said.
The petition is at: