Toxteth Park Workhouse - 126 Smithdown Road
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Until 1834 distribution of help or money to the needy, sick and elderly was the responsibility of the parish. In 1834 the Poor Law Amendment Act set up larger administrative units. Often several parishes were combined to form a Poor Law Union run by locally elected Boards of Guardians. Each Union ran at least one Workhouse. Able-bodied poor were encouraged to support themselves and the workhouses were the place of last resort for the needy and sick who were no longer able to work. These Unions were themselves supervised from London. 1837 - The West Derby Union was formed. It oversaw parishes stretching from Garston in the south of Liverpool up to Ince Blundell far to the north.  The West Derby Union ran the vastly overstreched Mill Road Workhouse.  Resources were stretched and conditions vastly overcrowded and finally on 13th May 1857 the Toxteth Park Union was formed, as an independent poor law parish, in an attempt to alleviate some of the burden being placed upon Mill Road.
This photo, dated 9th Oct 1925, appeared in a souvenir volume presented to the Rt Hon Neville Chamberlain, MP, Minister of Health on his visit to West Derby Union hospitals and Institutions.	1859 A new workhouse for Toxteth was erected in Smithdown Road.  It was designed by William Culshaw (already the architect of workhouses at Ormskirk and Belmont Road, West Derby) and it could take 600 paupers plus a further 100 in its new Infirmary. Increasingly the workhouses were becoming hospitals and later in the nineteenth century the level of medical care provided for workhouse inmates increased. The hospital wings of these workhouses increased in size and patients were admitted to the workhouse hospitals for treatment rather than being admitted as inmates. 2h
In 1891 there were 700 inmates recorded here (Gore 1894 quoting census figures). The Kelly for 1894 records the following list of staff and administrators 1913 was about when the workhouses started to change their name to 'Institutions' to reflect their change in role and also because the name 'workhouse' carried a stigma. In 1923 'The Toxteth Workhouse and Infirmary' thus became 'The Smithdown Road Institution'. 1930 - the Poor Law unions were abolished and and medical care for the poor became the responsibility of a local Public Assistance Committee Anoither name change meant that  'The Institution' became, in 1933, Sefton General Hospital.  The association with the name 'workhouse' stayed however and it is said that many were reluctant to ask for free care at these hospitals for this reason.
Records and history courtesy of Liverpool Record Office, Liverpool Libraries. Visit Liverpool Libraries online catalogues at http://archive.liverpool.gov.uk Liverpool records office holds many admission / discharge workhouse records. Many hospitals started life as workhouses and the changeover to hospitals was a gradual one, thus records may be of people admitted as workhouse inmates rather than hospital patients. This is particularly true of Sefton General Hospital, formerly Toxteth Park Workhouse/Smithdown Road Institution, ref. 614 SEF).
LINK to Rootsweb Workhouse List