IT had some of Worcester’s most commanding and panoramic views but Hillborough, as the 17-acre complex of thick-walled red-brick buildings was generally known, was one of the city’s most depressing places.

Built in 1794 on the east side of the city looking across towards the Malvern Hills, it enjoyed the rather grand title of Worcester House of Industry.

Less glamorously it was actually Worcester Poor Law Institution or Worcester Workhouse.

When it opened there were 223 paupers on the roll and 132 of them were children.

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Despite giving the city much meritorious service during the middle decades of the 20th century, when parts of it were used as a hospital, maternity unit and old people’s home, Hillborough could never shake off its past and eventually the decision was made in the 1980s to sell off the land to house builders Westbury for new homes.

Everything except the old nurses’ home, which was opened in 1928, and the former boardroom was flattened, including an impressive 100ft-tall chimney.

Had the conservationists had their way the whole lot would have been retained as being of architectural and historical interest and, considering what has been achieved in other parts of the area, notably the former Fownes glove factory on City Walls Road and the main block at the old Powick Hospital, you can see they had a valid point.

Given the will, Hillborough could certainly have made some very smart modern apartments with stunning views across the city. Too late now though.

When the House of Industry was built at the summit of Tallow Hill, the area was a park-like meadow.

It was described at the time as “a delightful eminence where citizens picnicked among the gorse and picked primroses”.

The house was built by George Byfield and came to be known as the Union Workhouse – it being a union of several city parishes.

The original intention was to run it as a home and occupational centre for the unemployed poor.

Children were admitted as apprentices to the making of flannels, coarse woollen cloth and in particular gloves. For a while it was quite successful.

Sadly, times changed as did attitudes to the poor.

After the Napoleonic Wars in the early 1800s a different view prevailed and Hillborough came to be regarded as a place of detention rather than a haven of rest.

Conditions were so harsh only the most desperate would go.

The “Workus”, as it was known, became a dark cloud that hung over every working man’s head.

Old people unable to support themselves, who had lived together for long years of married life, were separated into different parts of the building rarely to see each other again.

Historian Noake wrote: “Workhouse overseers have been encouraged to make the parish the hardest taskmaster and the worst paymaster.”

It was not until 1894 that women could be elected to the board of guardians of a workhouse and Martha Powell gave a depressing insight into life in one in around 1900.

She said: “The children were dressed alike in coarse ugly clothes and when they went out they were often shouted at and could not be told apart. The girls wore striped dresses, brown Holland pinafores and striped hats, sailor-shaped, very coarse black stockings and thick leather shoes.

“The women had to wear thick, hard, stiff unbending stays 'to strengthen and support them' which were very painful. They also had to wear several skirts, all pleated around the waist together with a flannel petticoat. The men wore corduroy and mole suits. The place was so cold they needed them.

“The children were all together in a dreary place called the school and close to the union workhouse. There was very little contact with the outside world. Those who had no relatives or friends did not leave the house for months and only then in the company of an attendant.”

Children above the age of five were not allowed whole milk, rather than skimmed, until the 1890s, while in 1884 one of the doctors at Bromsgrove (Worcester workhouse would have been much the same) pleaded: “Women doing hard and useful work should have tea and bread and butter for breakfast instead of gruel which they dislike.”

Things changed slowly in the workhouse and the spectre of them was very real in the minds of elderly people well into the 1940s.

By then parts of the Worcester site had become Shrub Hill Hospital and later it was to be the city’s maternity hospital and also a home for the elderly.

However, by the 1970s, with improving healthcare and more facilities built, some of Hillborough’s blocks had returned to nearer their original role, as squalid housing for evicted council tenants and the like. It was almost back to square one and that’s why it went.