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bronze plaque · England

Charles Dickens

Photograph at the Charles Dickens bronze plaque

Where the civic centre now stands was the Swinton Moral and Industrial School set up by the Manchester Poor Law Union. 'Union' was the name given to groups of parishes which had joined together to provide workhouses. The Manchester Union was one of the first to set up a large separate institution for pauper children. Charles Dickens himself visited the school in 1850 and said that it could easily be mistaken for a duke's country seat. He called it a pauper's palace. Swinton Industrial School Opened in 1846 - Closed 1925 'The Pauper's Palace' also locally known as "The Bastille"

Inscription drawn from imported open data, awaiting original TributeLegacy editorial.

Source: Open Plaques. Geographic data via OpenStreetMap.

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Location records are drawn from open, licence-clean datasets, kept here with attribution and gratitude to the people who maintain them.

  • Open Plaques, dedicated to the public domain (CC0). See openplaques.org.
  • Wikidata, available under the CC0 1.0 Universal dedication.
  • © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence.
  • Historic England, National Heritage List for England, used under the Open Government Licence v3.0. War memorial records are drawn from open community datasets (OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, NHLE) — never from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which is excluded.

Editorial descriptions, photography and tribute links are original TributeLegacy work, layered on top of the open data.

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