What's Left of the Workhouse? Traces of Britain and Ireland's Workhouses in Listed Building Registers, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata and Wikipedia

There is no open, complete list of the workhouses of Britain and Ireland. Rather than reconstruct one, I ask what traces of the workhouse survive in four open sources: the listed building registers of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata and English Wikipedia. Searching names, tags and classes gives 356 traces, each classified as a surviving building, a site or memorial, a burial ground, a street or place name, or a business using the name. Merging duplicates and grouping nearby traces gives 205 workhouse sites, 168 of them with a surviving building in the record. Where the record says what a surviving building became, hospitals (30) and homes (29) account for 74%, with 8 museums. The name outlives the building in 84 streets, places and features, 92% of them in England. Ireland's traces differ: only 55% of Irish sites have a surviving building in the record against 94% in Britain, and 14 of the 15 mapped workhouse burial grounds are Irish, a legacy of the Great Famine. The sources barely overlap (82% of sites appear in only one), and the result is far from complete: it maps the open record of the workhouse, not the workhouses themselves. Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/workhouses/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/workhouses. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/31/workhouses/.