Gruel and graft: museum asks if you could survive a Victorian workhouse

Visitors to the museum, one of Britain’s most complete workhouses, can take part in activities including tasting gruel. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Visitors to the museum, one of Britain’s most complete workhouses, can take part in activities including tasting gruel. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Guardian Gruel and graft: museum asks if you could survive a Victorian workhouse Revamped Ripon attraction reopens as a more immersive experience telling ‘national story’ of poverty and welfare V isitors to one of Britain’s most complete surviving Victorian workhouses won’t have to strip and bathe in someone else’s bath water. But they might get some gruel, they can sweep the yard and there are “schoolmaster” volunteers happy to tell children how to behave. “You are literally going to walk in the footsteps of people who have experienced this place,” said the director of the Ripon Museums Trust, Alexa Vernon. “I’m not sure we can serve gruel every day, but children will be able to get stuck into sewing and hunt for mice and listen to the sounds, and they might realise how lucky they are compared to Victorian children.” Vernon was speaking before the reopening of the Ripon Workhouse Museum after a £2.8m redevelopment. A key part of the revamp has been to make the experience more immersive with volunteers who might be baking bread or putting clothes through a mangle. View image in fullscreen The museum intends to give a realistic experience of what it was like inside a Victorian workhouse. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Guardian Visitors are asked if they would survive the Victorian workhouse. As they enter the vagrants’ block, the sound of unpleasant coughing fills the air. There are baths, a one-size-fits-all coarse men’s nightshirt and a reproduction “de-infestor” used to fumigate paupers’ and vagrants’ clothes. “All their possessions would be taken from them,” said the curator, Laura Allan. “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. “It’s interesting that the reasons people became homeless in the past are very similar as today – so alcoholism, mental health, family breakdown, veterans returning from war.” Elsewhere in the museum, visitors can shut themselves in a vagrants’ cell, pick oakum from old ropes or pose for a family portrait in replica workhouse uniforms. View image in fullscreen The museum’s reception area for vagrants and paupers. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Guardian The museum reopens to the public on Tuesday after major conservation and restoration work supported by the National Lottery heritage fund . It became a museum in 2017, telling the story of the Victorian solution to poverty and homelessness – give people a bed and food, but make it as grim, unpleasant and rules-bound as possible. A revamp of the museum building had been badly needed, said Vernon. “You could honestly stick a screwdriver in the