Monument record 0581700000 - TINDAL CENTRE, BIERTON HILL

Dimensions - Length 75m, Width 70m.
Aylesbury Union Workhouse built here 1844, replacing workhouse in Oxford Road. Elizabethan style, red & white brick, ornamental chimney shafts. Accommodates 300 inmates. Chapel & dining-room in centre of house; infirmary to rear (B1-2).
Became Tindal Hospital in 1940s (B3).
Detail & NGR (B4).
Front block survives; rest demolished (B5).
Aylesbury Union Workhouse opened in 1844, replacing an earlier facility. It was part of a national network of structured social provision built following the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. Designed by Strethill Oakes Foden (also responsible for workhouses in Bromley, Cuckfield, Rye, and Highworth & Swindon) in association with Assistant Poor Law Commissioner, Henry Walter Parker, barrister, it was located on Bierton Hill and stood within extensive gardens. It is believed that Parker used his influence to ensure the building did not look like a prison, presumably to set it apart from the prison which in the event opened across the road in 1845 - that juxtapositioning presumably reflecting an alternative view of the worth of the poor and the criminal sections of society. Although the Workhouse was intended to house 300 inmates only 117 were present in 1883 and 91 in 1893. Later the workhouse became a hospital, and is now a mental health unit. SOURCES: K. Morrison, The Workhouse: A Study of Poor-Law Buildings in England (1999) pp. 85-92; J.J. Sheahan, History and Topography of Buckinghamshire (1862), 76; Ordnance Survey 10" to the mile survey of Aylesbury (1878); R.C.H.M. report on Tindal Centre (formerly Aylesbury Union Workhouse) (1992), copy at National Monuments Record Centre, Swindon, index file BF 100290 (B8).