WORKHOUSE WALKS
Walking the Names

scroll down for more short films assembled from the readings and images contributed: Walking the Names in the time of the virus

Bath Union Workhouse Burial Ground
A field just off the Wellsway, Bath.
A burial ground that does not exist on a current map.
Here over 3100 bodies lie in unmarked graves, the last remains of those who died of poverty in the Bath workhouse between 1858 and 1899.
In the low winter sun you can make out the mounds and depressions of the burials.
A makeshift memorial comes and goes in a place that once may have had something more permanent.
Visitors add flowers occasionally. We add to them.
A regular monthly virtual walk, click here for latest details

A further 1100 bodies of those who died between 1838 and 1858 lie in unmarked graves in a small triangle behind the old Workhouse Chapel on Frome Road, Bath.

The only memorial there is to Rock 'n' Roll hero, Eddie Cochrane who died there following a car crash near Chippenham in 1960.
Eddie's body was finally buried in California, three steps to heaven, with step one taken in Bath's former Workhouse.

There are no memorials to the Workhouse dead.

Walking the Names
By 2019 the names of the Workhouse dead had been digitised we now at least have the names from the old register opening up a far easier way of finding out more about them. At the end of the year I hosted a first slow walk, walking and reading out the names, day by day, week by week and year by year of their burial. This will continue throughout 2020 as part of a slow walk, in principal on the first Sunday of the month from 11.00-12.00.. There will be a moment for sharing and conversation at the end of each walk, music and poetry welcome, a continuing improvised memorial and poor requiem. In April 2020 as a result of virus restrictions this part of the project went online, scroll down for reports on Walking the Namesonline

The next Walking The Names will be on
Sunday 5 July 2020 11.00-1200
Respecting social distancing and in our moment of exercise, walkers are invited to walk alone, read and record  names from the Workhouse Burial Register. In July you are invited to read at the burial ground in a social distance walk or contribute to a Zoom reading/walk or read and walk in your preferred location. Scroll down to see and hear what was produced in April, May and June. 

This is an open invitation, details here

As this develops John and I hope that more will join us and we will find out more about those whose remains lie under the soil of this field behind that grim wall just off Bath's Wellsway.

Bath Union Workhouse, Odd Down, Bath. Over 4000 Bath residents died in poverty 1838- 1899 they were buried in the land alongside the building and most in a nearby field. There is no memorial to them. 

An aerial photo a hot summer ago faintly shows the ragged teeth of the burial plots jammed in over a period of forty years.

Here in this field a rich city in a rich country at the centre of the richest Empire dumped the bodies of its poor.

The dead were officially and punitively denied the dignity of a 'decent' funeral, bodies were taken in a tunnel under the road and buried behind high stone walls. The authorities were consoled that at least they were buried in consecrated ground.

The ground is still consecrated.
Bath and NE Somerset Council still cut the grass.

Map data ©2018 Google

Workhouse Walks
In a series of performative walks in collaboration with historian and poet Dr John Payne 2017 coinciding with his exhibition about the Workhouse at the Museum of Bath at Work we hosted conversations about poverty and welfare. There were further walks to the burial ground in 2018, as part of the Bathscape Walking Festival where we improvised a poor requiem in the rain. Paying our respects to the forgotten poor of the enchanted city.

The resonances from these walks continues, opening conversations on poverty, welfare and civic responsibility. Many questions are unanswered about who the dead were and where they came from, as well as the practicalities of their burials and how this space might memorialise them appropriately. We learned about the Workhouse school and the love-struck school master walker Mr Winkworth, In 2017 we retraced the epic walk he led the Workhouse boys on around the parishes of Bath. Perhaps here lie the parents or grandparents of the boys, perhaps some of the boys themselves.

Walking conversations and research
This is a developing project and I am lending this page for building the network...there are so many questions and much to learn. Hopefully leading towards some kind of recognition and respect shown.

If you would like to be involved, help network, fund raise or research or have information to add come along for Walking the Names and /or use the contact form below...become a friend of the Workhouse Burial Ground? ( it needs some!)

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Walking the Names in the time of the virus

April 2020, as Covid-19 closed us down to isolation and social distancing, Walking the Names went online. An informal trawl of those who had joined the first few monthly walks resulted in nearly twenty walkers interested in taking part on line. Each walker was issued with a set of names from the Register of Burials at the Bath Union Workhouse burial ground.

Our first virtual Walking the Names on Sunday April 5th was the day in which the government announced 708 dead from the virus. In May as the UK deathtoll from the virus officially reached 30000 the project continued. The June walks took place as the death toll exceeded 40,000. Many of the deaths were in carehomes, the modern homes of the old and the vulnerable, many of the deaths are of careworkers. There are resonances with those who died of poverty in the Victorian Workhouse and we reflect on contemporary responsibilities. Every names was a life. Every death a local tragedy. Walking and reading the names, recorded or not, breathes a momentary presence to that life.

Bath Workhouse Burial Ground. 5 April 2020

As we walk and read, connections emerge.

Walkers have discovered ancestors buried in the field.

Tragic local stories, snap shots of brutal poverty and brief lives before the welfare state, glimpses of the punitive regime of the workhouse.

Please get in touch if you would like to help discover the stories behind the names. .

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This column of the page records the individual walks and readings taken in our permitted moments of exercise, I have assembled them with imagery from the walks and layered the voices to produce short audio-visual memorials.

These assemblies of readings retain the noises, distortions and reader stumbles as sound echoes of our reaching out through time, shame and the Burial Register to real lives lived long and others so sadly cut short.

The buildings formerly Bath Union Workhouse, the earlier unmarked burial ground of 1100 unmarked graves is beside the old chapel.

In May 2020 the lines between the burial pits appear to be marked out in daisies. Perhaps growing on the compressed and relatively undisturbed old burial ground paths

A walker shared a poem....
WALKING  THE LOST

I walk in circles on the lawn
just as I’ve walked the distant hidden burial ground.
I read my list of names
just twenty of the twenty four hundred
hidden from history below the soil there.

Unmarked,
they have vanished,
as tears vanish,

into the earth.
Twenty names
with life spans varying from
twelve hours to eighty six years.

The world around me is locked down
in pandemic.  
But would we let those dying now
disappear without trace?

I read the names with pride
proud to help them resonate
even quietly and quickly
across this earth, 
once their earth.

Able Lawrence  5th April 2020

The garden of Westfield House, built in 1721, looking across the valley to the city of Bath. I often think of what this house and all the people who have lived here, have borne witness to - the times they lived in - the lives they lived here.

Other walkers are trying to discover some more about the names, their stories and how their lives ended hidden from sight, buried in an unmarked grave. In the absence of photographs others are trying to imagine their faces. More readings and information to follow. In the time of the virus this is a way of connecting, bearing witness, walking and asking questions. Do join us.

Walkers shared images of where they walked, where they read; contributions came from far and wide, from Denmark and Frome and the Burial ground itself. Walking in witness and with solidarity, spring time in the year of the virus.

the names were heard in Denmark

John Payne shared a story from his family:
My great-grandfather Charles Payne was born in 1829 in Chewton Mendip, one of a family of 9 brothers and sisters. In about 1850 he went off to Bath to make his fortune, marrying Ann Phipps there in 1853. He worked as a gardener, but was unable to make provision for his old age. Both he and his wife died in the workhouse and are buried beneath the field at Odd Down. There are records. Their names are there in the list of burials carefully preserved and transcribed in the Bath Record Office in the vaults of the Bath Guildhall. And there is some interesting medical material too.

It appears that Charles Payne was one of the noisier inmates of the Bath Workhouse. In fact he was raving. On 1 July 1891 he was admitted to the Mendip Asylum at Wells. His medical certificate from the workhouse reported: ‘he has delusions, viz that he has a million of money in Chancery and 40 acres of land at Highbridge which is not correct. He is very destructive, tears up the bed clothes and is very noisy. History – has been in the workhouse for some years but his mind has only been affected for about 3 months. No personal history available.’

To have ‘money in Chancery’ implies some kind of unclaimed inheritance, and this sense of having been badly done by may well relate to the decline of the Chewton Mendip family from tenant farmer to farm labourer status in the first half of the nineteenth century. Charles’ occupation on admission is ‘farm labourer’. There is no record of any connection with Highbridge, a town on the Somerset Levels, well distant from Chewton.
John Payne, A West Country Odyssey, Hobnob Press, 2020 (forthcoming)

Another walker was working on the  recording day in April, he wrote,
By chance I'm on duty today so this was recorded on a break walking the grounds of Dorothy House Hospice: to me there is a contrasting continuity there.
I needed to update my team on a few things today and talking about your project as a way of highlighting how important it is we keep going at this time.  By keeping this history alive it has reached into the present day corona virus response in a way that would have been impossible without your efforts so thank you!