ABSTRACT
The recent celebrations marking 50 years of the National Health Service revealed much about British attitudes to health and social welfare, as the spotlight remained almost totally focused on the advances in acute medical care taking place in prestigious hospitals. The fact that 1948 also saw the abolition of the Poor Law and sweeping changes in the system of care for many vulnerable groups in society passed almost unnoticed. The end of the Poor Law should also have represented the final curtain for the workhouse, but its sturdy walls ensured a continuing existence in the new world of the welfare state. Like a character in a horror film, it may have been pronounced dead but it refused to die. For several decades the former workhouse buildings were both an essential resource for the new NHS and a constant reminder of the past that had been renounced. As the tide of opinion turned against institutional care and in favour of care in the community, the former workhouses and asylums provided easy targets for reformers. Now that this transition looks much more problematic than once it did, there is a fresh incentive to re-examine policy in terms of the continuities between the old and the new.
