Renny Lodge Hospital

Also known as Poor Law Union Workhouse

In 1834 the ‘Poor Law Amendment Act’ was passed to provide a refuge for the sick and homeless with its sole intention to deter the able bodied from claiming poor relief.

Consequently Newport Pagnell became one of many towns to be formed into a Poor Law Union where a board of Guardians were elected to decide on a workhouse design.

The first building on this site, a workhouse designed by William Roote, was built in 1836 with the first inmates entering the Newport Pagnell Union Workhouse on the 8th April 1837.

In 1929 the Local Government Act abolished workhouses and the building was transferred to the Local Authority. This is when the Workhouse first became known as Renny Lodge Hospital and was primarily used for caring for the elderly and the chronically ill.

In 1948 the running the hospital was transferred to the newly formed National Health Service and Renny Lodge was an NHS hospital until it closed in 1992.

The hospital was finally demolished in 1994 with the site laying unused until 2005 when archaeologists excavated the site where they identified field boundaries and patches of cobbling that were possibly from yards or tracks going back to medieval times.
The excavation also revealed the site had been used much earlier in Roman times with the discovery of Roman pottery.

Today the old Renny Lodge site is a new housing development of a affordable property which was built by Crest Nicholson and the housing association William Sutton and consists of 68 homes and was completed in 2008.