I have looked though the posts on DUDLEY RD WORKHOUSE very quickly & correct me if I am wrong but was not the workhouse called "WESTERN ROAD" Later to become DODLEY ROAD, HOSPITAL (NOW CITY HOSPITAL).Sorry if this has been said before?
My mother nursed at the Western Road Hospital for many years from the mid 50s until her retirement in the 70s. It was indeed the old Workhouse attached to the Dudley Road Hospital. You went into the Hospital from Dudley Road (very impressive iron gates as I remember) but to go into the Workhouse side you went down Western Road and entered from there, through more iron gates!
When Mum worked there it was the Geriatric Unit attached to the main hospital and I remember her telling me that many of the elderly patients were initially extremely upset when they were admitted for care as, of course, they
remembered it as the Workhouse, and didn't understand that it was now a hospital. It was the accepted belief that once you were in there you didn't come out again!
I used to go there very often as a teenager during the school hols to help out on the wards and in the therapy department. I remember very clearly that the 'bones' of the Workhouse were still very visible in every dark corridor and old fashioned ward, it didn't take much imagination to see it as it must have been in the bad old days, it was still very Victorian even then in the 60s.
When I took my son to the Eye Department at the new City* Hospital earlier this year I was very surprised to see that it's sited where the old Western Road Hospital used to be. (I've been exiled in the South west for many years and am only recently 'home' so hadn't seen all the changes). It gave me a very weird feeling to be treading that ground again after so many decades!
*Sorry, but it'll always be Dudley Road to me, my mother nursed there before and during the war, I was born there and so were my children!
There's nothing like Tradition!