Workhouse/workplace

Carlisle’s Buildings - 9

Union Workhouse

Built in 1863 as the Carlisle Union Workhouse, this impressive, but quite forbidding, building is now a very different kind of workplace.

It was originally commissioned by the Carlisle Poor Law Union in response to overcrowding at other workhouses in the city and was designed by architects Lockwood and Mawson who, I was interested to learn, were responsible for famous buildings in Bradford - St George’s Hall, City Hall and the Wool Exchange. It housed almost 500 inmates.

During the First World War it became a military hospital for the North West. After several years, and having treated 9,809 patients, it was closed in June 1918 and it returned to its former use as a Workhouse.

Then it was converted to a municipal hospital and was used again as a military hospital during the Second World War. In 1948 it became the City General Hospital.

And now it is part of the Fusehill Campus of the University of Cumbria.



(We were in Carlisle and called into Tullie House to see an exhibition of the Cumberland landscape paintings of Sheila Fell. These are a long way from the usual pretty landscape paintings of the Lake District - they are dark, bleak but beautiful. Well worth seeing.)