Harehills ❤️ Love

Back in 2019, the Thackray Museum of Medicine closed down – Woah! Wait, don’t panic, it was just closing down for a £4million refurbishment. However, when the pandemic hit, the grand re-opening got pushed back 10 months. But for those that did panic, it reopened again in May this year.

The Thackray Museum of Medicine building is the former Leeds Union Workhouse, built to house the poor, the infirm and the mentally ill. A dark place, that gradually in the 19th century became more dedicated to the medical care of the poor, than a workhouse. Then after the first world war, it became part of St James Hospital, up until the ’90s when the building was assessed as unfit for practising modern medicine. In 1997, after Parliament gave permission, the building became host to the Thackray Museum of Medicine.

That’s an abridged history, and next year I will be doing a more in-depth article about the Museum, its history and the history of the Leeds Union Workhouse.

May and June this year they were holding Harehills Mondays, which allowed local residents free entry to the museum so that everyone nearby could have access to our medical history, see where we came from, and how we got to where we are today.

I took my niece over the summer holidays, and we had a fantastic time exploring medical history through the ages in a tactile activity fuelled environment, my niece especially loved the gallery of the medical machines through the ages.

Obviously, during a pandemic, the museum feels slightly more relevant, but the truth is, medicine, health care, hygiene are always relevant to the modern world, and how we live within it. So get on down and experience it for yourselves. It easily takes a couple of hours to get around everything, longer if you really want to take it in, or if you want breaks in between. Passes are annual passes, so you don’t have to tackle it all in one go either, you can focus on a subject or a time period.

You can book a visit at their website, and they have a strong presence on social media on Twitter and Facebook.

You can find all the released Advent Posts here: Harehills Good News Advent Calendar 2021