At the present time there is much concern about the management of residential care homes and what is happening to them. This focuses on short-term questions related to current policy. Our project is concerned with the longer term: what kinds of home continue to provide a service from one decade to another? What events have precipitated closures? What adjustments have helped to sustain continuity?
In the late 1950s Peter Townsend undertook a study of residential care for older people in England and Wales. His findings and recommendations were published in 1962 in his book The Last Refuge.
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| Having published his well known book The Family Life of Old People in 1957, Peter Townsend undertook his fieldwork for The Last Refuge in 1958 and 1959. | Peter Townsend is now Centennial Professor of International Social Policy at the London School of Economics. |
Townsend was surprised to find that, despite the 10-year-old welfare state, a substantial proportion of older people were still being accommodated in homes that had been workhouses.
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| The Poplars, Wolverhampton (c. 1958) © Peter Townsend |
Westminster House, Liverpool (c. 1958) © Peter Townsend |
These two photographs were among numerous images taken when Townsend was conducting his fieldwork for the The Last Refuge. He drew a sample of 173 residential care homes: 39 former PAIs, 53 other homes run by the local authority, 39 voluntary homes and 42 private homes. He and his colleagues visited these homes in 1958 and 1959. More of Townsend's photographs from his fieldwork can be seen on the Photographs page.
The data, including the photographs, are now deposited in the National Social Policy and Social Change Archive at the University of Essex.