St Marylebone Institutions

While the destitute working classes went to the workhouse, almshouses were often the destination for genteel elderly people who had fallen on hard times. Today, almshouses provide homes for 36,000 people across the UK.

In 1837, £500 was left to the poor of the parish of St Marylebone in the Will of Count Simon Woronzow, the old Russian Ambassador for London. The Vestry of St Marylebone were in charge of creating the almhouses, and the local landowner, Colonel Henry Samuel Eyre, leased a site to John Wardell and Hugh Biers, trustees, for a term of 99 years. The architects John Pink and John St Erlam then designed an Elizabethan building, however this was later replaced with a neo-Georgian style in 1965.

The aim of the institution was ‘to afford an asylum and means of support to aged and decayed parishioners of St Marylebone, and their widows, who are of good character and industrious reputation, who have paid 10 years rates (later revised to 7 years) in the parish …. and, who, by unexpected reverses, or the failure of their accustomed means of support, have fallen from a state of respectability into indigence, but have not had recourse to Parochial Relief’. This traces back to the Victorian idea of the ‘deserving poor’.