I would not want to have been sent here 150 years ago. Idyllic as these buildings stand today, and a great many are still to be found, their structures cloak what their original purpose was used for. A place to house and work the poorest in society. Some of these buildings are now used as pleasing spruced-up appartments, others house NHS in-patients, the long arms of the British state still grappling with what they started.
They all share a common ancestor, and so the lookalike is easy to spot, up and down the land. These government manufactured poverty warehouses were designed on mass to house and in many cases break a workforce into submission. There were not leading places when mortar was freshly set, they were places one step away from gaol, but close enough to remind that if you didn’t pay your way then the state will take from you and put some interest on top.
When I encounter these buildings, so I like to stand, if only for a short while, but just long enough to imagine the fleeting moments of those lives that were shovelled up and thrown head first into these appalling Victorian doom structures.
Some made it out but the inevitability of their return was set, the wheels whirring motion as father to son to those in the cradle were propelled on a spinning loop of poverty, one that the state was only too happy to profit from.