Blue Plaques: The Tipton Workhouse

This blue plaque, erected by the Tipton Civic Society, marks the former site of the Tipton Workhouse, an institution rooted in English poor-relief policy stretching back to the 16th century. Workhouses housed the destitute — orphans, beggars, and the disabled — putting their labour to use in manufactories, a system dramatically expanded under the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. Nothing of the original structure survives; the plaque alone marks a place that shaped the lives of the town's most vulnerable inhabitants.