Workhouse • Sudbury

 On the boundary between the residential flats and the Church of St Gregory’s you will find a gated archway. This is the last remnant of St Gregory’s College and it is today Grade II listed. The college provided a residence for six secular canons and it was founded in 1374 by Simon Sudbury and his brother John. The site on which the college was built was thought to have been the site of the home of Nigel Theobald, their father. Unfortunately by 1526 the college was in a state of disrepair and it ultimately closed during the dissolution of the monasteries, the land being surrendered to the crown. The site would be owned by several people after this, until it was eventually bought by the Borough of Sudbury, who put the building to use as a workhouse in the early 1700s.

A new Sudbury Poor Law Union was formed in September 1835. Initially they employed three workhouses. The one at Sudbury was for able bodied males over 13 years of age. There was also one at Bures for the aged and infirm of both genders, and another at Melford  for able-bodies girls up to 16 years of age and boys between 7 and 13. A year later they made plans to create a single new workhouse and the old workhouse site at St Gregory’s was purchased. This new workhouse received its first inmates in June of 1837, but by December an outbreak of smallpox temporarily halted admissions. In 1861 the Poor Law Board published a return naming every adult who had been a workhouse inmate for more than five years. It included their total length of stay and the reason for admission. There were two inmates on the list who had been there since its first year of operation, a total of 23 years of their life lived within the walls of the institution. One was Mary Bryant who was listed as ‘infirm’ and another was Sarah Debenham who was listed as an ‘idiot’ but also there due to her age. Obviously not language that would be used today, but other reasons for the people becoming longstanding residents were ‘paralysis’, ‘defective sight’, and ‘fits’. These institutions would really be used to house anyone unable to provide for themselves in the wider community. Further buildings were added to the site later including a hospital block and receiving block. The site was taken over by the County Council in 1929 and it slowly became a local hospital. In 2014 it was closed and converted into the flats we see today.

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