charity begins with a home

[Geffrye Almshouse (1714) by John Piper, now The Museum of the Home]

A week of thinking about almshouses, a subject I keep coming back to.

I didn’t reread The Warden, but I did reread The Winds of Heaven. Because I wanted to remind myself of the fear I felt the first time I read it and understood just how precarious so many lives are and, in particular, the lives of older women. Louise, approaching sixty, is left high and dry when her bullying husband dies leaving her with his enormous debts and three uncharitable daughters - shades of King Lear - who pass her around in the summer months like an unwanted parcel (in the off-season she goes to most brilliantly depicted, funny, but shockingly awful hotel on the Isle of Wight). Her widowhood is set up like a line of dominoes; it only takes one unfortunate event to happen for the whole sequence to topple, and she is only ever one domino away from destitution. But she could, in theory, be saved by an almshouse.

I am fascinated by almshouses, their architecture, locations, histories, roles, rules. One cold December, we stayed in Beamsley Hospital (above), a rare circular almshouse for women founded in 1593 on a dark hill-side near Skipton. The cake-slice rooms surround an unheated, ultra-plain chapel which we had to cross constantly to access other rooms, the wind howled, and I began to understand why the matrons had difficulties with the inmates breaking the eleven strict C17 rules and nicking off to drink in the town, and why in the end no-one wanted to accept this sort of charity in the age of central heating, indoor plumbing, and modern sheltered housing.

[Chipping Campden (1612), photo by Edwin Smith (1953). According to the recent Pevsner, “The building, (is) rightly considered the crowning achievement of the domestic Cotswold style and mason-craft of the early 17th C.”]

Beamsley Hospital was unusual in being so isolated; most almshouses are in prime locations in the heart of England’s cities, towns, and villages. Some are huge, prominent and self-important, others are adopt a modest vernacular style. I love spotting them, and admiring these essentially domestic buildings which vary enormously according to date, location, materials, type of donor or charity or affiliation.

[Cambridge Royal Albert Homes, founded 1846]

They may be built in low terraces or be set around courtyards, have cottage-style lattice windows and neat gardens, or resemble Gothick follies with ogee arches and turrets. Some are built of brick - I like the Victorian Gothic polychromatic almshouses (above) in Cambridge - others of mellow stone as in Stamford or Chipping Campden.

[St Marylebone Almshouses (detail), St John’s Wood Terrace (1936) by Enid Marx (c1940)]

There may be lovely tall chimneys (St Cross, Winchester), clocktowers, inscriptions, dedications,

[Holy Trinity, Heath Town, Wolverhampton (1850)]

fancy Dutch gables, grand gateways, coats of arms, statues and memorials to the donor(s), and - importantly - nice, solid front doors. They often have likenesses to other building types which also announce their benevolence, charitable foundations, and public roles such as estate cottages, cottage hospitals, primary schools, grammar schools, Oxbridge colleges, rural police stations with accommodation attached, vicarages, even public baths and wash-houses. Ultimately, though, they are actual, permanent homes, the kind of thing that Louise, like many people whose dominoes have all fallen, so badly needs.

[copy of the rules board, Laetitia Monson’s Almshouse, Broxbourne]

There’s a flip side, of course, in the history. Having stayed in Beamsley and seen the rules board, and read more about various conditions and stipulations, I’m not so sure such charity was always welcome when came with so many strings attached (and often the stigma of having to go about town in brightly coloured uniforms made of coarse fabrics). In the past, there was always the whiff, sometimes an overpowering aroma, of piety and sanctimoniousness, with inmates having to be eternally grateful for a place to sleep and three meagre meals a day. As I heard on a visit to Browne’s Hospital in Stamford, it often amounted to nothing more than this: no privacy, no space, no warmth, and the obligation to do ‘prayer-work’ in the chapel in return for the donor’s munificence. It was better than the street or the workhouse, but often only just.

[Hopton’s Almshouses (1746-69), Southwark. Even Dickens couldn’t have imagined this.]

In some ways, at least in the past, almshouses were all about the physical representation of charity, the richly detailed material embodiment of a donor’s virtue. Often a whole architectural pattern book was used on the exterior making them wonderfully eccentric or exaggerated. But inside, the rooms were plain, ascetic, small and basic. I’m not saying this is a terrible thing - they were built for a series of poor occupants who had few worldly goods - just that were not perhaps as sweet and cosy as they appear externally. Dickens, of course, was on it. He wrote about the picturesque, miniature dwellings of almshouses which had the power to deceive and make us sentimentalise, and contrasted them with “smoky-fronted London Alms-Houses, with a little paved court-yard in front enclosed by iron railings…which were once in a suburb, but are now in the densely populated town; gaps in the busy life around them, parentheses in the close and blotted texts of the streets”.

The language of almshouses could reveal de haut en bas attitudes. It was once fine, as with talk of ‘insane asylums’, to use words which are now beyond the pale. The Fishermen's Hospital ((1702) above, painted by Mona Moore (c1941)) was built for 'decayed fishermen', and elsewhere almshouses were built for the ‘distressed’ or ‘indigent ancient men and women', or ‘aged and deserving poor’, ‘ladies of reduced fortune’. ‘poor widows or spinsters’, and my favourite, ‘for aged persons who have seen better days’.

[Lord Burghley’s Almshouse, Stamford (1611) by Edwin Smith (1955)]

Almshouses were an early form of social housing. Today there are around 36,000 dwellings provided by around 1,600 almshouse charities - some ancient, although the Victorian era was the last great age of almshouse building (about 30% of what exists today). I particularly like reading about those built in London for specific trades: bakers, framework knitters, haberdashers, drapers, girdlers, weavers (there’s a good book by Clive Berridge).

But it says something, a great deal in fact, that we are again having to fall back on this sort of charitable offering of ‘shelter and respite’ due to the lack of available, affordable council housing, derisory pensions, and an increasingly older population. Amazingly and very heart-warmingly, they are being built again, now with greater compassion, modern principles, and beautiful designs. A recent study suggests that almshouse residents could live 2.5 years longer than the general population and looking at the two new almshouses near where I live, I can see why. The developments in Girton and Great Shelford are progressive, thoughtful, imaginative, and welcoming. As with another new project in Bermondsey, they are “reinventing the historic model of an almshouse”.

[entrance to Bromley College (1666) by Barbara Jones (1943)]

Almshouses are a superb subject for research. There is plenty published on their donors, patrons, historical religious/aristocratic/trade connections, and architectural history. All well and good, and very dry. But what of the domestic history? How was it or is it like to live in one? What were/are the internal arrangements like, how have they altered, how were they furnished, what did people bring with them of their previous lives, are there washing lines, who decides on the flowers and planting, how did the residents spend their days (when not in chapel)? I want - metaphorically, at least - to press my nose up against the windows and have a good look inside.

There’s a dearth of good images of almshouses (why, I wonder…). It’s no coincidence, though. that they have often been painted and photographed by people such as John Piper, Edwin Smith, Enid Marx, and Barbara Jones who all valued the ordinary and domestic, the peculiar Englishness of almshouses (and they are a very English phenomenon), and the fact that these were buildings created for some of the poorest people in society which gave them back their independence and dignity.

[King Edward VI Almshouses (est 1400), Saffron Walden]

I like knowing that almshouses are there, a protected species with charitable status and often ancient foundations, beyond the reach of developers and bankrupt local councils, and still proving that charity does not simply begin in the home, but often begins with a home. So why are we not building even more? “Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?” asked John Keats, just as we might ask, “where are the billionaire philanthropists of today? Ay, where are they?” Not being philanthropic, but off buying yachts and planes and overpriced modern art. Definitely not in the business of putting their names over much-needed almshouse dwellings.

Happy Sunday!