Ripon Museums - Jail, Courthouse, Workhouse
Ripon Museums - Jail, Courthouse, Workhouse
Three venues in one, Ripon's museums allow you to uncover history.
Together the three museums tell a sorry and interwoven story of Law and Order in times past. Malefactors would be incarcerated at the Prison or Police Station before being taken to the Courthouse for trial. If a custodial sentence or transportation were imposed a family might be deprived of its breadwinner, perhaps leading to its remaining members being forced to seek the 'relief' of the Workhouse.
We are delighted to have won several awards in the last few years including;
- Museum Accreditation for all three museums
- Investing In Volunteers Award
- Sandford Award for Heritage Education
- Environmental Award for the Workhouse Garden
- Regional winners for the Marsh Award for Volunteers in Learning from the British Museum
- Finalist in the White Rose Tourism Awards
Workhouse
The grim atmosphere of the Workhouse Museum has been carefully maintained in order to give visitors a sense of what life in a Victorian Workhouse could have been.
The Workhouse Museum is housed in the Gatehouse building, part of the larger Workhouse site (which visitors are welcome to explore), which contained the Guardians’ Room, Vagrants cells and Receiving Ward for inmates. We have also worked hard to recreate the original Workhouse Kitchen Garden, located to the rear of the Workhouse Site which would have been tended by the inmates and been used to feed them.
A feeling of doom or at best hopeless resignation must have fallen on many passing through the Gatehouse arch and hearing the door shut behind them. They knew they would leave only in the regulation coffin, 'with two handles, name of the person with the year of their decease inscribed'. Coffins were ordered in bulk.
Prison & Police Museum
The history of policing is traced through displays of uniforms and artefacts from the Trust's extensive collections of police and prison memorabilia.
Sit in a prison cell, hear the door slam shut and imagine the harsh conditions of Victorian prison regimes. Try on prison uniforms, imagine the horror of being set in the pillory, strapped in a restraint chair or hung in chains.
Courthouse
Stand in the dock and be sentenced, find out about the people who were transported to Australia for stealing as little as a pair of boots and see a cat o'nine tails as used on the transport ships in the exhibition.
Education