At the Warwick Society

‘The Dark Side of Warwick’ was the title of a talk provided by Unlocking Warwick for the monthly meeting of the Warwick Society on 8th November in the grand hall at the Lord Leycester Hospital.

Kate Sargent described how her researches at the County Record Office had revealed extensive poverty, disease and crime in overcrowded lodging houses on the north and west sides of the town in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition in London celebrating the best of Victorian Britain. Rick Thompson read extracts from the Warwick Advertiser’s accounts of magistrates’ hearings in the Jury Street Court House, and reports from the Inspector of Nuisances to the town’s Board of Health describing an overwhelmed sewage system, polluted water supplies and numerous deaths from smallpox and typhus. 

The very poor conditions in the prison in Barrack Street, and the nearby House of Correction, with its treadmills operated by inmates, led to a series of reforms in the second half of the 19th century, and the building of a new Warwick Jail in Cape Road.

The Warwick Society is the town’s civic society helping to make it ‘a better place to live and work’. The annual subscription is just £11. https://warwicksociety.wordpress.com