Rummaging in the attic I unearthed some old slides of Bangour Hospital that I had taken in about 1990, though with all the appearance of having been taken a couple of decades earlier than that.
It wasn’t the finest day when I visited – dreich to say the least – but the buildings did not fail to impress. The church is the centrepiece of the large complex, though it was built later than the patients’ villas, admin and other ancillary buildings, and while the earlier buildings were designed by the wonderfully named Hippolyte J. Blanc, it was Harold Ogle Tarbolton that was the architect of the church.
And these roughly coursed yellowish sandstone blocks with red tile roofs. Both types have those distinctive round-arched dormer heads. The hospital closed in 2004, since when the buildings have slowly deteriorated – the haunt of Urbexers and film crews.
This is a photograph of Villa 9, near the administration block, ‘Curved Ridge’ taken in August 2012, by SwaloPhoto and licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
This aerial photograph taken by RCAHMS in March 2015 gives a sense of the vastness of the site.
The listed buildings on the site have been on the Heritage At Risk register since the 1990s. Early in 2015 NHS Lothian engaged GVA James Barr to draw up proposals for the conversion of the former hospital to form housing, to aid marketing of the site for sale, with a view to submitting Full Planning Permission later this year. There is a website marketing its development potential www.bangourvillage.co.uk.
The hospital was originally built as the Edinburgh District Asylum from 1898 to 1906, Bangour was planned on the continental colony system as exemplified by the asylum at Alt Scherbitz near Leipzig, which had been built in the 1870s.
Extract from the OS map published in 1915 showing the heart of the site. Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland
The Edinburgh District Asylum at Bangour was begun slightly before that at Aberdeen (later Kingseat Hospital), which was also built on a colony plan, making Bangour the first new asylum for paupers to be built on this system. (The Aberdeen District Asylum at Kingseat, though begun after Bangour, was completed two years earlier). A move towards a colony system had been made at some existing asylums in Scotland, notably the Crichton Royal at Dumfries, from about 1895. The distinguishing feature of the colony plan asylum was the detached villas to accommodate the patients which aimed to create a more homelike environment.
The competition held in 1898 for the new Edinburgh Asylum specified the continental form of plan. Bangour was designed as a self-contained village with its own water supply and reservoir, drainage system and fire fighting equipment. It could be self-sufficient by the industry of able patients.
Plan and elevation of the hospital block by Hippolyte J. Blanc,1906, in the National Monuments Record for Scotland collection of the RCAHMS
The site was divided into two sections for the medical and non-medical patients, with power station, workshops, bakery, stores, kitchen and laundry in the middle. The patients’ villas housed from 25 to 40 patients each and varied from two to three storeys. On the ground floor were day-room, dining-rooms and a kitchen with separate dining-rooms for the nurses. The dormitories were located on the upper floors. Another important aspect of the colony system was the replacement of the large common dining halls with smaller dining-rooms within the villas. This was a feature of the Aberdeen Asylum at Kingseat as well as Bangour and the later Dykebar Asylum at Paisley.
The recreation hall, also designed by Blanc, contained a hall measuring 93 feet by 54 feet, with a stage at the north end. By incorporating a lattice steel girder support for the roof, there was no need to use pillars within the hall. There was even an orchestra pit in front of the footlights which was specially constructed to allow it to be covered at floor level when the hall was used for dances.
The church at Bangour Village Hospital, photographed by RCAHMS in 1993
A church was added to the site in 1924-30 designed by H. O. Tarbolton. Set in a central position on the site and in a severe Romanesque style, it is one of the most impressive hospital churches in Scotland. The dark brown stone of the church contrasts strongly with the cream-painted villas near to it.
The church, photographed when it was newly built, part of a set of old photographs of Bangour in the RCAHMS collection
In 1931 the nurses’ home, with its two ogee-roofed octagonal central turrets, was extended by E. J. MacRae with a large new wing, blending sympathetically with the original block. [Sources: H. J. Blanc, ‘Bangour Village Asylum’ in Journal of the R.I.B.A., Vol.XV, No.10, 21 March 1908, p.309-26: Lancet, 13 Oct. 1906, p.1031]
This post takes another look at prefabs and temporary buildings, following on from those featuring Doecker and Ducker. Perhaps the most prolific supplier and manufacturer in England was Humphreys of Knightsbridge. It was Humphreys’ firm which, in 1907, provided the wood and iron hut for the British Antarctic Expedition led by Ernest Shackleton, that was assembled by the team in 1908 at Cape Royds, on the coast of the Antarctic continent. The hut was still standing in 2009 when Henry Worsley and two descendants of that party retraced Shackleton’s steps, and stayed in the hut.
James Charlton Humphreys (1848-1932) ‘small in stature… big in business’. Humphreys’ activities in Knightsbridge were covered in the Survey of London’s Knightsbridge volume. James’ father, also James, had been a corn dealer in the 1850s moving into iron and steel by the 60s. James Charlton Humphreys, was the youngest of the five sons listed in the 1851 census at their home in Smith Street, Chelsea. He started out as a dealer in iron before becoming an iron merchant and contractor. In the 1881 census he was employing 20 men and living at Albert Gate, Knightsbridge with his wife and two young daughters.
The iron-buildings business at one time had occupied a former floorcloth factory in Hill Street (Trevor Place), but by the early twentieth century was largely carried on in Pimlico, the company’s offices and showrooms remaining at Albert Gate Mansions. Humphreys himself became a well-known local figure, not only as an industrialist and property-owner but also as a member of the Westminster Vestry and a Volunteer officer. In the 1911 Census when James Humphreys was living in a large house in Haslemere, Surrey, he described himself as chairman of the firm, Humphreys Ltd ‘contractors for buildings of every description’.
In the 1922 edition of Henry Franklin Parsons’ book on isolation hospitals there is a chapter titled ‘Movable hospitals and hospitals of more or less perishable construction’ which illustrates some of Humphreys’ temporary hospital buildings and discusses their construction, merits and deficiencies. The one deficiency that they were unaware of at the time, sadly, was the health risk associated with asbestos. Fireproofing was a primary concern for this type of building which was essentially a large wooden shed heating by an iron coal or wood-burning stove. Lozenge-shaped asbestos-cement tiles in red, white or grey were often used in place of corrugated iron for the walls or roofs, internal lining of the huts was either the highly flammable match-boarding or asbestos-cement fireproof sheeting. As Parsons noted, match-board lining became very dry over time, and flames ran along the spaces between the timbers so that ‘buildings of this sort have in many instances been rapidly consumed, in some case with loss of life’. The danger point was where the flue of the stove passed through the roof or wall. As the buildings were so badly insulated, the stove was stoked up and the pipe overheated. Generally they were hot in summer, cold in winter and noisy in hail storms or heavy rain. (When I was a child, my family lived for a time in a house with a corrugate-iron roof, and I well remember waking up in terror the first time it rained as the noise was extraordinary – l thought it sounded like gunfire.)
The lightness of these buildings held further dangers: ‘Frame buildings covered with wood or iron have also been on several occasions blown over or wrecked during a storm, causing much hardship to the patients’. This seems something of an understatement. In Scotland a Deocker hospital hut put up in 1895 by the Lorn District Committee at Ellenabeich, Kilbrandon, was mostly blown into the sea and lost during a gale within a year of its erection.
I don’t know where exactly the but was erected, but this is an extract from the first edition OS map showing Ellenabeich, Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland
Humphreys’ patent iron hospitals were covered in Robert Taylor’s Hospitals Investigator issue no.8. He had come across an advertisement for their buildings in The Hospital, one of the most useful journals published in that period for information on hospital design. The advertisement, on p.429, volume 57 for 6 February 1915, gave a list of places where Humphreys’ iron hospitals had been erected.
‘From the presence of names such as Thingoe it is clear that this is not simply a list of places where hospitasl were built, but includes an uncertain number of names of local authorities that are different from the locations of the buildings, an important difference when it comes to identifying the buildings. ‘Oxford’ clearly means the surviving hospital at Garsington, the Gosport and Portsmouth hospitals survived in the early 1990s, and the Wareham hospital was said to survive in use as a house. Netley was of course the Welsh Hospital. Many others are known to be demolished, including Eton, Hardingstone, Ipswich, Loewstoft, Plymouth, Slough, Stowmarket, and Thingoe. Of those that can be identified at present, a large proportion seem to be smallpox hospitals. The Bury St Edmunds example could be either the municipal smallpox hospital or a private tuberculosis sanatorium already known to be by Hmphrey; both are now gone.
The advertisement also gives the current prices for hospitals, but omits to say how much ground work has to be done by the client. The prices quoted range from £403 for a 12-bed hospital to more than twice that, £820, for 40 beds.
Of these, further information can be given the following:
Bury St Edmunds: this is probably the Humphrey sanatorium built in 1910 for a private company as the Bury and West Suffolk Sanatorium.
Chesterfield: the Borough Council had a temporary 10-bed hospital in 1895, considered unsatisfactory by the LGB inspector (PP 1896 XXXVII, 723)
Durham: the Borough Council built an iron hospital in 1894 which the LGB considered unsatisfactory even before completed (PP 1896 XXXVII, 746).
Gosport: one building was extant in the early 1990s, collapsing but still in use, recognizable as Humphrey’s.
Hereford: the Borough Council erected a 16-bed hospital of corrugated iron lined with wood in 1893, considered unsatisfactory by the LGB inspector (PP 1896 XXXVII, 779)
Keighley: perhaps the ‘temporary’ smallpox hospital here in 1894 (PP 1896 XXXVII, 797)
Leigh (Manchester): Leigh Joint Hospital Board was constituted in 1894; a smallpox hospital at Astley consisted of two corrugated iron buildings, presumably Humphrey’s. One had 16 beds and a nurses’ bedroom, the other 12 beds and a nurses’ bedroom and a kitchen (PP 1909 XXVIII, 81).
Macclesfield: in 1887 a ‘Ducker temporary hospital’ was erected here for smallpox, this may have been replaced or supplemented by a Humphreys model about 1890 (PP 1890 XXXIV, 129).
Netley. The Welsh Military Hospital, built in 1914 to the designs of E. T. and E. S. Hall at a cost of between £6,500 and £7,000 as a gift from the people of Wales to the fighting forces. It was first erected on the parade ground at Netley Hospital, with the intention of moving it to France later.
Orsett: the Joint Hospital Board erected a Humphrey’s corrugated iron building at Thurrock in 1901 (PP ?1901, XXVI, 140)
Oxford: the borough smallpox hospital was in Garsington parish, with a building recognizable as Humphrey’s containing two wards, an administration building with a few characteristics, and a small mortuary, all surviving in the early 1990s.
Portsmouth: A recognizable Humphrey block with two wards survives as an addition of 1909 to the municipal infectious diseases hospital now (1992) St Mary’s Hospital; it is used as Medical Records.
Thingoe: Thingoe Rural District Council, Bury St Edmunds, built a ‘temporary’ wood and iron hospital for smallpox in 1902 for £606 (PP 1909 XXVIII, 57).
Windsor: the smallpox hospital here was a temporary corrugated iron building erected alongside the sewage farm in 1893 to cope with a smallpox epidemic (PP 1900 XXXIV 99).
See also the isolation hospital, Arne, Purbeck, Dorset. From Michael Russell Wood’s Dorset’s Legacy in Corrugated Iron, 2012. “Halfway between Wareham and Corfe Castle, just off Soldiers Road, Arne, stand the Isolation Hospital and Nurses’ Bungalow. They were put up in the early 1900s. This hospital is the finest remaining example of the type and, together with the bungalow, is listed grade II. These are the only listed iron buildings in Dorset.”
The Hospitals Investigator issue 7, circulated in November 1992, included an update on the memoranda concerning the provision of isolation hospitals produced by the Ministry of Health in the 1920s, a preliminary look at school sanatoria – specifically those built for boarding schools, considers the question of lifts in hospitals and finally provides some references for hospitals built just prior to the outbreak of the Second World War as part of the Emergency Medical Scheme. EMS hospitals and hutted annexes added to existing sites often remained in use for decades, despite having been considered as temporary buildings. The availability of materials affected their construction, and they vary from timber to brick. At the former workhouse in Amersham, which by the 1930s had become St Mary’s Hospital, a small annexe of these huts was built. By the early 1960s one of these was in use as a maternity ward, serving the local area – and that was where I was born.
Memoranda on Isolation Hospitals (again): Cubicle Isolation Blocks
In our third number we dealt at length with the memoranda on isolation hospitals issued by the Local Government Board. In 1924 a further edition was published, by which time the LGB had become the Ministry of Health. The main change in 1924 was that the facing-both-ways plan (Plan B in the 1902-21 editions) had been omitted, leaving only the former plans C and D, which became B and C respectively, without any alteration. The overall site plan (Plan A) was amended in line with this, and had only simple pavilion outlines. Space for a future boiler house had been added behind the administration block, perhaps indicating a change in technology, from stoves to central heating, in small hospitals.
Plan C is described as an Observation (Cubicle) Block, intended for single cases of diseases other than smallpox, mixed or doubtful infection. One nurse may, provided rigid precautions are taken, attend to more than one patient. The Department is prepared to accept wards as small as 12ft by 10ft. An air space of 1,872 cubic ft is said to be permissible in cases of diseases other than smallpox, if the 12 linear feet of wall space and 144 sq ft of floor space are provided, but in smallpox hospitals 2,000 cubic ft per bed are required.
This basic and small-scale isolation ward works on the cubicle principle, it was published in the early 1920s as a model plan in the Cambridge Public Health series.
Interestingly, the sentences saying that unnecessary duplication of small hospitals in an area is to be avoided, have been tightened up to increase the emphasis.
The types of wards suggested were thus reduced by 1924 to two only, the pavilion and cubicle blocks. Thus ‘official’ isolation hospital ward planning had begun with the simple huts of 1876, then gone through a phase of great diversity and finally settled down with two basic and simple types. This was still the position in 1947 when E. and O. E. published the final edition of their useful book Planning: the architect’s handbook. The same two basic types are given, along with a fanciful plan with hexagonal cubicles that was actually built at Tolworth.
This block was destroyed during the Second World War. A similar design was adopted in the two cubicle blocks added to the Mogden Isolation Hospital (later South Middlesex Hospital), Twickenham, in 1937. They were unoccupied and due for demolition by the early 1990s.
School Sanatoria
Robert Taylor noted that having attended a working-class day school in the Black Country, he felt that his knowledge of public schools was minimal: ‘Innocently we assumed that a school sanatorium was a glorified sick-bay, although we should have suspected something when we discovered that the sanatorium at Uppingham School had more beds than any other hospital in the county. It seems that this simple and obvious sick-bay interpretation is wrong, and that we were forgetting our own childhood illnesses. Jeremy Taylor ignores school sanatoria, thus presenting a challenge. In the meantime, here is a theory to set discussion or argument rolling.’
‘At present sanatoria dating from before 1864 are unknown to us. The earliest seems to be that at Harrow School, built in 1864 to designs by C. F. Hayward, and resembling a cottage hospital with square ward-rooms lit on one or two sides; it held 16 beds for a school of 500 pupils. It supplemented but did not entirely replace the earlier system of sick rooms at each house at school. Despite the unspecialized nature of the very domestic plan it had, apparently in common with all other school sanatoria, built in the last quarter of the 19th century, the primary function of the instant isolation of infectious diseases.’
Perspective view, with First and Ground floor plans of Harrow School Sanatorium published in The Builder, 23 Jan 1869, pp.66-7
‘Boys could not be sent home but had to be treated institutionally, hence there was a generous provision of beds in relation to the number of pupils. Any other accident or illness could also be treated in the same building, but the planning was determined by the treatment of infectious diseases. At Harrow it seems that the sick bays of the houses had been unsuccessful for the treatment of infectious diseases, and after the building of the new sanatorium they remained in use for other ailments.
‘So far during fieldwork we have seen two types of sanatorium (apart from Harrow), both suitable for infectious diseases, but differently planned, and these differences have a chronological significance. It will be valuable if it can be discovered whether this distinction has real meaning. The two late-19th century sanatoria, at Sherborne and Warwick, consist of two separate two-storey blocks linked only by an open corridor, one containing the wards and the other the ‘administration’ and at least in the case of Sherborne a third ward as well. These wards are thus surrounded and isolated by fresh air in the approved manner, and are also designed in accordance with contemporary principles. At Sherborne Keith Young was chosen instead of the usual retained architect because of his special knowledge of hospital building. There were 22 beds for a school of 270 pupils. We have yet to see the sanatorium at the Asylum for Fatherless Children at Reedham, where three wards on each of two storeys gave isolation for three diseases for both boys and girls, presumably one sex on each storey. Again the declared aim of the sanatorium was to treat infectious diseases first, and any other diseases as they arose.’
Sherborne School sanatorium
‘The second type of school sanatorium was seen at Oundle and built about 1930. It is a two-storey cubicle block added to one side of an older house that became the administration department. The 16 cubicles all opened Southward onto balconies. Again this is in accordance with current planning ideas, but it is far more flexible than the larger wards of Sherborne and Warwick, and so more suitable to the mixed use of a school sanatorium as suggested above.’
Lifts
We have often marveled at the steep staircases in hospitals, and wondered whether female wards were often placed on the first floor because ladies were easier than gentlemen to carry upstairs. Lifts seem to be almost impossible to date, and some documentary evidence may help understand how patients were moved.
At the Northampton Infirmary patients were carried from 1793 until 1872 when two hand-operated lifts were installed in the wells of the two main staircases. These remained hand-cranked until 1911 when they were converted to electricity. Two lifts were installed in the two staircases at the North Devon Infirmary at Barnstaple in 1872 and 1873, but we do not know how they were operated.
Dates for events like Otis’ experiments to demonstrate the safety of his ratchet mechanism in 1854, and its first installation in a public lift in 1857, and the first successful electric lifts developed in 1889, are well-published, but the process of installing lifts in hospitals is not yet clear. Most seem to be inserted in the generous wells of already existing large staircases, the dreadful blind towers of the modern lift shaft being a phenomenon of the second half of the 20th century rather than earlier.
Emergency Medical Scheme Hospitals
The Builder carried brief notices of Government and Military contracts, sometimes hopelessly brief and uninformative. Emergency Hospitals were reported until 13 October 1939, when the lists of H.M.O.W. contracts were discontinued because they were regarded as being of potential use to the enemy.
Stoke Mandeville Hospital was originally built as part of the Emergency Medical Scheme, many of the hutted ward blocks remained in use in the early 21st century, but have since been demolished, the area where they stood has been developed for housing.
This OS Map from 1955 shows the easily recognisable layout of the blocks. The small group of buildings at the south-west corner were a pre-existing municipal isolation hospital. Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland
This OS map from the 1930s shows the isolation hospital and the future site of the EMS hospital. Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland
The Emergency Hospital buildings that were recorded up to that date are as follows.
21 July 1939 Sunderland
4 August 1939, p.222 Mount Vernon Hospital, Hammersmith Hemington Infectious Hospital, Middlesborough
11 August 1939, p.250 Highwood Hospital, Brentwood Furse Hospital, Hillingdon Windosr Public Assistance Institution St Mary’s Hospital, Amersham
25 August 1939, p.347 Farnborough Hospital, Kent Stanmore Hospital Staines Institution
1 September 1939, p.385 Bishop Auckland Evesham Public Assistance Institution Black Notley Sanatorium Pinewood Sanatorium, Woking Middleton in Wharfedale Otley Chapel Allerton Chester le Street
8 September 1939, p.419 Horsham P.A.I. Three Counties Hospital Boleys Park Mental Hospital Preston Hall Hospital, Kent Arclid PAI Nantwich PAI George VI Sanatorium Scotton Banks Sanatorium Clatterbridge Hospital Ormskirk PAI
15 September 1939 Aylesbury PAI St Andrews PAI, Billericay Hexham West Malling Institution Warkwich PAI Botleys Park (West Surrey Waterworks)
22 September 1939, p.483 Warranford Hospital, Guildford Cuckfield PAI
The Builder published plans of two Emergency Medical Service hospitals, one said to be in the Home Counties and the other in the Midlands. The precise locations were concealed as a matter of national security, but the areas given prove to be grossly misleading. Both hospitals can now be identified. The hospital said to be in the Midlands (Builder, 9 October 1942, p.306) is readily identifiable by its amazing plan as Stoke Mandeville Hospital. Not only does the plan show the hospital as built, but in the 1990s most of it survived. The Home Counties Hospital (Builder, 24 April 1942, p.359) turned out to be the Churchill Hospital in Oxford, which again survived largely intact into the 1990s.
October 1992 brought forth the sixth newsletter from the Cambridge team of the RCHME Hospitals Project. It included short pieces on mortuaries and asylum farms, and accounts of the Victoria Cottage Hospital, Wimborne, Dorset, with thoughts on holiday closures of hospitals. There is also a note on Sleaford’s isolation hospital, a portable hospital with what sounds like a camper van for the nurse. Extra curricular activities at hospitals were discovered too, with money making schemes in a Yorkshire madhouse and an unofficial B&B at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge.
Victoria Cottage Hospital, Wimborne
This unremarkable little Dorset hospital has a history written in 1955 by someone hiding behind the initials G. H. W. From this booklet we can extract several amusing bits of hospital history.
First must come the sanitation. In 1887 when the hospital was built there was one earth closet for the patients. This came to light in 1907 when water was installed along with an extra closet. The operating theatre was another horror for it doubled as the bathroom from 1887 until 1904 when a new operating room was built. Even this new theatre did not have an electric light until 1934. Provision of a separate operating theatre did not end the dual use of the bathroom, however. Until 1927 it housed the telephone. In that year the telephone was moved to the matron’s office.
Extract from the 1901 OS map. The cottage hospital is to the north-west of the town, almost on a level with the union workhouse, which is to the north-east. Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland
Until 1924 the hospital closed completely for about a moth every year, for cleaning and repairs. During this time the staff took holidays, and the patients were dismissed. Some were sent to the small 18th-century workhouse in Wimborne, for in 1922 the Guardians sent the hospital a bill for care of patients. We have met this sort of annual closing and cleansing elsewhere, but it seems poorly documented. In 1946 the Passmore Edwards Hospital at Liskeard closed for a moth because that was the only way in which the staff could take a holiday; our source does not say whether this was a regular event. The Royal National Sanatorium at Bournemouth closed in winter, allegedly because the hospital was only intended to provide a summer break for consumptives (and thus for their carers as well). At Northampton the General Infirmary managed cleaning and repairs by simply closing one ward at a time, but as this was a large hospital part-closing was easier than in a small hospital like Wimborne.
Finally, on a frivolous note, when the townsmen were discussing whether to commemorate Victoria’s jubilee by building a hospital or by some other means, one suggestion was ‘erecting a statue of Queen Victoria with a clock on top’. Just how this was to be arranged is not explained.
Sleaford Hospital
The Sleaford Rural District Council bought an isolation hospital in 1901 for the sum of £127. It was ‘an ingenious contrivance’ of numbered wooden sections that could be put together in a few hours, measured 20 feet by 12 feet and could hold up to four patients. A van on wheels provided both accommodation for a nurse and the necessary cooking arrangements. There was also a portable steam disinfector that was reported to be too heavy to be portable. This magnificent hospital was stored at the Sleaford Workhouse, and was erected for the very first time for the benefit of an inquisitive Local Government Board inspector in 1905. It is not known whether it was ever used after that. [The inspector’s report is in Parliamentary Papers, 1907 XXVI, 200-201.]
The East Stow Rural District Council in Suffolk had a ‘small portable hospital’ for smallpox cases in 1913, and presumably this was also a sectional wooden building. [PP 1914 XXXVII, 746] In 1913 Bournemouth Corporation had lent the neighbouring Rural District Council a Doecker Hut for use as an extra hospital ward during an outbreak of enteric fever at Ringwood, another portable structure. [PP 1894 XL, 565 and see Doecker Portable Hospitals]
At least these buildings were of wood. Shortly before 1890 the Gainsborough Rural Council bought a hospital marquee for patients and a bell tent for the nurses. They were aired from time to time, but appear not to have been used. [PP 1894 XL, 565] Perhaps even these tents were better than the converted dog-kennels at Bishop Auckland in 1895. [PP 1896 XXXVII, 704]
Mortuaries
In the course of research for the project a file copy turned up of a Government questionnaire headed ‘Isolation Hospital Accommodation’, and filled in for the Southampton Smallpox Hospital. The printer’s rubric shows that it dates from 1926 and that some 10,000 copies were printed. The answers, together with a crude plan from another source, make a description of this vanished hospital possible, but there is little of interest until the question ‘is there a mortuary at the hospital?’ The answer is simply ‘Cubicles in Observation Hut used for this purpose’. The observation hut was a small building with two single-bed wards and a duty room If one cubicle was occupied by a patient, the psychological effect of comings and goings in the other cubicle can hardly have been good. Perhaps the real significance of this arrangement is that the observation wards of isolation hospitals were probably rarely used, and that there never was a living patient to be disturbed by the arrival and departure of a dead one. It also helps to suggest ways in which hospitals without mortuaries might have functioned.
Extract from the 1934 OS map. Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland
The smallpox hospital was at Millbrook Marsh, an inhospitable looking place even as late as the 1930s, surrounded by mud and marsh. It is interesting to see that development of the estuary was just beginning at this time, to the east is the King George V graving dock under construction. By the 1950s the hospital site had become a boat yard, re-using the existing buildings. A couple remained in the late 1960s, when the area to the north had become a sewage works, which eventually swallowed the remaining former hospital buildings.The huge Prince Charles Container Port was built over the mud flats and saltings.
Extract from the 1897 OS map. Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland
Southampton, in common with other ports, provided a number of isolation hospitals. As well as the smallpox hospital there was another isolation hospital at West Quay.
It is in the usual location, close to the water so that anyone arriving by ship suspected of having contracted an infectious disease could be taken directly to the hospital by boat. The site was later an Out-bathing and Disinfection Station for Infectious Diseases and later still used for a clinic and a mortuary.That was in the post-war era, and by then land reclamation had seen the site removed from the water’s edge. As far as I can make out, the Grand Harbour Hotel seems to occupy the site now.
Asylum Farms
Slowly it is becoming clear that asylum farms were unlike those in the world outside, at least in the South of England. Large barns for storing crops are absent from those seen so far, but piggeries are ubiquitous and any fragments of yards and single storey buildings appear to have been for cattle. Sometimes there are stables and cart sheds, but it is not certain that these were specifically for farm use. Indeed the buildings suggest that attention was concentrated on stock, especially pigs and cattle, and perhaps market gardening, where there was greater scope for farming as occupational therapy. At Digbys, Exeter, there is a tall building which had large opposed loading doors, one opening on to the yard, the other on to a lane outside the hospital grounds. The building is not large enough to hold much, and certainly is not suitable for storing a grain crop. It seems to have been intended for receiving bought-in material, presumably feedstuff for the pigs and cattle.
Digby Hospital, formerly the Exeter Lunatic Asylum. The small farm complex is on the east near to the London & South Western Railway line. The buildings have been converted to housing as part of the re-development of the hospital and its site for housing.
Extract from the 1st Edition OS Map published in 1889. Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland
The advantages of concentration on livestock is that it would provide the asylum with pork, bacon, milk and beef, while a market garden would provide soft fruit and vegetables. All of these are labour-intensive occupations, providing maximum work throughout the year for the relatively large number of patients.
Secondary Employment
John Beal was the proprietor of a private madhouse at Nunkeeling in the Yorkshire Wolds. The financial success of this venture seems out of proportion to the small number of patients and the remoteness of its position. The truth emerged in 1823 when the excise men found 24 casks of tobacco, 25 of tea, and 264 of assorted spirits, mainly gin, concealed about the premises. Perhaps we should pay greater attention to such institutions, in the hope that more than just buildings survive.
Income
Those hospital administrators busy trying to generate income have all failed to exploit one obvious opportunity that was seen as long ago as 1770 by the Matron of Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge. The town has long had a shortage of short-term accommodation. The matron saw this and let beds to overnight visitors, presumably giving them breakfast as well. On discovering this the Governors dismissed her, partly because she was pocketing the income.
While hunting for Doecker portable hospital buildings I came across its American counterpart, including an illustrated catalogue advertising their wares published in or after 1888. Founded by William M. Ducker of Brooklyn, New York, U.S.A. who had patented his invention, the Ducker Portable House company had offices in New York and London. The catalogue showed a variety of uses for their buildings, ranging from the utilitarian hospital hut to more elaborate garden buildings. Ease of transportation was also emphasised.
Here one of their portable buildings is neatly packed onto a horse-drawn wagon. While below the image shows the mode of transporting a Ducker building in mountainous countries. The buildings were ‘light, durable, well ventilated, warm in winter, cool in summer, healthful and cheap’. From reading the description of the buildings they seem to be almost indistinguishable from the Danish Doecker system, the components being wooden frames, hinged together, and covered with a special waterproof fibre. The same claims are made for both that they could be assembled without skilled labour.
This example was said to be at Wellington Barracks in London. Another was erected in Blackpool; Henry Welsh, the local Medical Officer of Health, noted in August 1888 that the recently erected building ‘gives great satisfaction, and answers its purposes admirably’. The cost of this model was given as $600. The German War Department bought one, and they had been adopted by the United States Naval and Marine Hospital Service, and several Departments of Charities and Correction. In 1885 the Red Cross Society had organised an exhibition in Antwerp of portable hospitals at which the Ducker buildings (and Doecker prefabs) had been shown. Ducker’s was awarded a special medal by the Empress of Germany and, so it was claimed, garnered the ‘warmest encomiums from civil and military surgeons, engineers, architects and philanthropists from all parts of the civilised world’. Wards are suitably Spartan, the interior here measured 18 x 34 ft.
The Department of Public Charities and Correction, Randall’s Island Hospital erected a Ducker house. Of the many pest houses, generally for smallpox cases, erected in America, it seems likely that if they were not actually Ducker houses, they were of a similar design, as is suggested by an early photograph of a pest house put up at Storm Lake, Iowa, photographed in 1899 (see University of Iowa libraries)
Temporary buildings were widely used at large construction sites to house migrant workers. Above is an administrative building, suitable for ‘Contractors and Construction Companies’ or for a private residence. It comprised a main building 16 x 30 ft and a separate kitchen and store-room connected by a covered passage. The workforce would be accommodated in huts such as this one.
This is its interior, with simple iron bunk beads, it put me in mind of the description of the bunk house in Of Mice and Men. These huts were bigger than the hospital buildings, at 30 x 30 ft, and cost just over twice as much at $1,250.
Versatility was key to healthy sales figures, so the catalogue demonstrates a variety of different uses for the Ducker portable building. Sports pavilions were an obvious use; above an athletic and bicycle hall, others illustrated were a racing stable, a boat house and a bowling alley. A photographer’s studio could be constructed for just $375, or a billiard room for $400 (billiard table not included). ‘The attention of hotel men is called to the fact that for annexes to hotels, to be used for sleeping apartments during the rush of midsummer, these building just exactly answer the purpose’.
For the domestic market there was a range of summer cottages (above), lawn pavilions (below) and camping houses. The Norton Camp House could have been yours for $150 (and upward), measuring a cosy 9 x 12 feet and weighing 450 pounds. It could accommodate four people, and opened out on all sides. Camping was not necessarily a leisure pursuit, and this camp hut was also touted for cattle ranchmen, miners, prospectors, surveyors and contractors.
If you were on vacation, however, you might have considered a bathing house. ‘The portability of these buildings make them simply invaluable… At the end of the season they can be taken down and stored until the opening of another season. They can be constructed in any form or style desired and can be made to comfortably accommodate more people than any other building known’.
The Lawn pavilions were the most decorative, being intended for ornament as well as usefulness, aimed at owners of large summer residences. ‘They are constructed in decidedly artistic style.’ ‘and will be found useful and delightful for ladies’ sewing, reading and painting rooms, children’s play rooms, tea and lunch rooms, tennis purposes, and sleeping rooms as well if required’ If you didn’t run to summer residence with large grounds in need of a lawn pavilion, then don’t worry, you could have an entire summer cottage or camping cottage. The latter pretty much the same as the hospital huts, but the former comprised the most ornate in the Ducker range.
This example seems to be giving a stylistic nod towards a Chinese pagoda or an Indian bungalow. As I am heading to Fife in Scotland later in the summer, I was particularly tickled to read the testimonial on the back cover of the catalogue which was furnished by one George C. Cheape, of Wellfield house, Strathmiglo in Fife, master of the Linlithgow and Stirlingshire hounds. ‘No country house should be without one’ he wrote: ‘It was put up in one day by the village joiner and my gamekeeper.’ He continued to effuse about the merits of the building: ‘In wet weather the children quite live in it, and play all day. I have gymnastic apparatus put up in it, swings, etc; the consequence is a quiet house, whilst the children are enjoying healthy exercise and games to their heart’s content, where they disturb no one, and their tea-parties in the Ducker House are enjoyed by all.’ Cheape was a Captain in the 11th Hussars, Justice of the Peace and Deputy Lieutenant of Fife. He was also widely travelled, had served in India, and had visited America on three occasions, having business interests in Texas, Colorado, Arizona and California. While in America he also travelled to Canada and Mexico, and worked to promote the interests of the International Company of Mexico, of which he was a shareholder. Sources: The catalogue for Ducker Portable House Co. can be found online from archive.org, information on George Cheape was from the census, marriage records, passenger lists etc and there is a brief biography in David Pinera Ramirez, American and English Influence on the Early Development of Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico, 1995 pp.99-100
In the Hospitals Investigator number 5 the following list of suppliers of temporary hospital buildings was given: Humphrey’s of Knightsbridge; Boulton and Paul of Norwich; Portable Building Company of Manchester; Hygienic Constructions and Portable Buildings Ltd; Wire Wove Roofing Company of London; G. W. Beattie of Putney; and Kenman and Sons of Dublin. To this list should be added Spiers and Co. of Glasgow, prolific providers of isolation hospitals pretty much throughout Scotland.
A Doecker hospital hut at Netley Hospital during the Boer War, from Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images http://wellcomeimages.org V0015643
The Hygienic Constructions and Portable Buildings Ltd were the agents for temporary buildings constructed on the Doecker system invented by Captain Döcker (usually rendered Doecker in English) of the Royal Danish Army. Johann Gerhard Clemens Döcker (1828-1904) first patented his portable building system in 1880. (He filed patents in France and Germany in October 1880, in Denmark and Austria-Hungary in 1881, in Norway, England, Spain, Belgium, and Italy in 1882; in Russia, Sweden and Victoria in 1883; and in New Zealand and the United States in 1884.) The full text of the patent he submitted in the United States can be read online here http://www.google.com/patents/US308833.
Three sheets of drawings provided details of his system:
Sheet 1 from Doecker’s USA patent 1884. [Source: United States Patent and Trademark Office, www.uspto.gov]
‘My improved portable and impermeable structure is composed of a series of light frames which may be made of wood or metal, and for general purposes such frames are polygonal in shape. Each frame a is covered with a sheet of impermeable material, permanently connected therewith in any suitable manner, as by nailing, riveting, or gluing. Two such frames are permanently hinged together by means of any suitable form of hinge, and a pair of such frames constitute a panel.
Sheet 2 from Doecker’s USA patent of 1884. [Source: United States Patent and Trademark Office, www.uspto.gov]
‘The frames are hinged together so as to fold inwardly toward each other, so that their covering will not come in contact when folded. I prefer to cover the frames with strips of felt, which may be rendered water-proof either before or after being attached to the frames, and I prefer the latter method, especially when the felt is attached by means of nails or rivets, for the reason that the points of attachment will then be covered by the waterproofing substance applied, and produce water-proof joints, which would not be the case when the felt is applied after being rendered impermeable. This impermeability may be imparted to the felt by any one of the many waterproofing compositions or water and fire proofing compositions, or by means of oil-paints. I prefer to use felt, owing to its density and non-conductive properties, it being better adapted than any other material to shield the occupants of the structure both from heat and cold.’
Sheet 3 of Doecker’s USA patent of 1884. [Source: United States Patent and Trademark Office, www.uspto.gov]
The term Doecker hospital was sometimes used generally for portable hospital buildings, whether or not they were in fact of Doecker construction. Doecker buildings were largely used on the continent, and in Britain were also used for elementary and open-air schools. There were two types: strong or light. The strong type were intended asa a substitute for permanent brick or stone buildings, while the light were for temporary and/or portable buildings, which could be put up quickly and cheaply.
For both types the buildings were made in sections roughly 3ft x 3ft (a little less than a metre squared). These sections could be fastened together with iron hooks and studs, allowing for de-construction and re-erection on another site. The strong type comprised timber frames weather-boarded on the outer side and covered on the inside with a composition called ‘Doecker material’ – a non-inflammable, water- and acid-proof. These two layers provided a cavity that was filled with insulating material, though the walls were only 4 1/2 inches thick (about 11 cm). The roof was covered with a flexible and water-proof material (‘ruberoyd’).
The light construction had a lighter frame covered on both sides by Doecker material. The whole building was made in sections, and the packing formed the floor ‘thus saving weight, space, and freight in transit’. No foundations were required, the building sat on adjustable wooden feet. Constructed these light buildings measured 50ft x 16ft (15.24m x 4.8m) and could be erected in one day by unskilled labour. Their insulation properties were commended: ‘Portable hospitals of this construction were used by the German Red Cross Society during the cold of a Manchurian winter in the Russo-Japanese war, and they have also been used in the tropical heat of South-West Africa’.
An image from 1900 of Doecker hospital huts, Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images http://wellcomeimages.org V0015642
Doecker system hospital buildings, along with other prefabricated buildings, featured in H. Franklin Parson’s book Isolation Hospitals, originally published in 1914 and revised in 1922 by R. Bruce Low.
This hospital pavilion, with is sun-catching angled wards, was a type provided by the Hygienic Constructions and Portable Buildings Ltd, Stockholm Road, South Bermondsey.
The 1922 second edition formed part of a series of books on public health and hygiene (the Cambridge Public Health series) designed to advise those working for the government and the medical profession. It addressed the way in which infectious diseases were contained and treated, and defended the government’s decision to spend a significant amount of money on isolation hospitals. Parsons and Low discussed the most advantageous designs and locations for these institutions, the containment of diseases such as small pox and tuberculosis, and the issues that arose around both the staffing of isolation hospitals and the changing provisions made for those patients affected by severe poverty.
August 1992 saw the production of newsletter number five from the RCHME Cambridge office. There are snippets here about sanitary facilities – water closets and baths – and and more on temporary buildings. There are also useful indexes to information in the Parliamentary Papers, with reports on English provincial workhouse infirmaries by Edward Smith from 1867, and the enormously useful survey of hospitals in the United Kingdom carried out by Bristowe and Holmes in 1863.
Hereford Workhouse
In 1866 an inspector from the Poor Law Board visited the Hereford Union Workhouse in order to report on the infirmary. He found that the building was being greatly enlarged, and that two new wards were being built over the dining room. There was only one water closet on each side of the main building, at first floor level, but there were some other water closets in the yards that contained water aden were flushed twice or three times a week. The dry wording leaves one in doubt about the presence of water in the closets on the first floor. The rest hardly bears thinking about.
The previous insalubrious snippet came from the Report (to the Poor Law Board) of Dr Edward Smith, 15 April 1867, on 48 Provincial Workhouse Infirmaries. It is published in Parliamentary Papers 1867-8 LX, pp 325 onwards. In these reports Dr Smith examined critically the provision for the sick, and gave a table for each workhouse examined, listing for each ward the dimensions, position of windows, number of beds and fireplaces, and present function. The only plan published is a block plan of Birmingham workhouse. {This was being demolished at the time the newsletter was written, in the summer of 1992.} One of the things that emerges from this report is that by 1866 rooms in workhouses were often used in a very different way from what was originally intended. Using the pagination of the original report rather than the imposed pagination of volume LX, the 48 workhouses are as follows:
The Portsea Island Union Workhouse Infirmary at Portsmouth was built in 1842 and extended in 1860 by an additional storey. {This later became St Mary’s General Hospital} Unfortunately we did not manage to get inside this derelict building, but we do know something of its internal arrangement. The wards on all three floors were on the South side of the range, and there was a corridor along the North side. The wards had windows on the external wall and also into the corridor (part of alterations of 1860), thereby providing cross-ventilation of an indirect kind; the corridor also had windows on the external wall. The internal windows had shutters, but we are not sure of the details. The Poor Law Board inspector in 1866 was not over-critical of this arrangement, for cross-ventilaiton was still a new hobby-horse for hospital reformers. A comparable arrangement of parallel wards with a common wall pierced by windows appears at the London Fever Hospital of 1848 and in the new Halford Wing of the Devon and Exeter Hospital built in 1854.
The acceptability of this internal ventilation provides a background to the roughly contemporary alterations at the Military Hospital at Devonport. This hospital was built as a series of pavilions in 1797, each floor of each pavilion consisting of two wards side by side separated by a corridor containing a staircase. The hospital was criticised in the 1861 report on military hospitals, and was subsequently altered. The stairs were removed and windows inserted in the walls between the corridor and the wards. Presumably there are a few other hospitals with wards ventilated through corridors, but they are unlikely to date from after the 1860s.
Bristowe & Holmes
Appendix 15 of the 6th Report of the Medical Officer of the Privy Council for 1863 is titled Report by Dr John Syer Bristowe and Mr Timothy Holmes on the Hospitals of the United Kingdom. This report records the reactions of the authors to visits paid by one or both of them to what they believed to be all of the major hospitals in the Kingdom; it has a supplement of brief critical descriptions of 81 hospitals in England, and some sort of plan is published for 25 of them. The Report is Parliamentary Papers 1864 vol. XXVIII; Bristowe and Holmes’ appendix begins on p.467 as renumbered for the Blue Books (463 of the original pagination), and the supplement begins on p.575 (571 original pagination). The following list uses the titles for the descriptions of the hospitals, and the amended pagination. English hospitals were divided into metropolitan, provincial and rural; Scotland and Ireland were dealt with on pages 692 to 726.
ENGLAND Metropolitan Hospitals 575 St Bartholomew’s Hospital, plan of block C 577 The Charing Cross Hospital, plan of front range 579 St George’s Hospital, plan of 1st floor 582 Guy’s Hospital 585 King’s College Hospital, plan of 1st floor 589 London Hospital 591 St Mary’s Hospital, plan of ground floor 594 Middlesex Hospital 596 St Thomas’s Hospital, plans of North Wing and first floor 599 University College Hospital 600 Westminster Hospital, plan of second floor 602 Royal Free Hospital
English Provincial Hospitals 605 Birmingham General Hospital 607 Birmingham Queen’s Hospital 608 Bristol General Hospital, plan of second floor 610 Bristol Royal Infirmary, plan of 1st floor 611 Hull General Infirmary 613 Leeds General Infirmary, plan of G floor 616 Liverpool Southern Hospital 619 Liverpool Northern Hospital 621 Manchester Royal Infirmary, plan of 1st floor 623 Newcastle Royal Infirmary 624 Sheffield Infirmary, plan of attic storey
English Rural Hospitals 626 Barnstaple Infirmary 626 Bath United Hospital 628 Bedford Infirmary 629 Bradford Infirmary 630 Sussex County Hospital {Brighton} 632 Suffolk General Hospital at Bury St Edmunds, plan of ground floor of old hospital and new hospital 634 Addenbrooke’s Hospital at Cambridge, plan of ground floor 636 Kent and Canterbury Hospital, plan of ground floor 638 Cumberland Infirmary, Carlisle, plan of ground floor 640 St Bartholomew’s Hospital, Chatham, outline plan of ward 641 Cheltenham Hospital 642 Chester Infirmary 643 Chichester Infirmary 644 Essex and Colchester General Hospital 646 Derbyshire General Infirmary, plan of attic {first} floor, fever house 648 Devonport Hospital {Royal Albert} 649 Dover Hospital 649 Devon and Exeter Hospital 652 Gloucester Infirmary 653 Hereford Infirmary 655 Huddersfield Infirmary 656 Ipswich and East Suffolk Hospital 657 Lancaster House of Recovery 659 Leicester Infirmary and Fever House, plan of ground floor 661 Lincoln Hospital 662 West Kent General Hospital, Maidstone 663 Northampton Hospital 664 Norfolk and Norwich Hospital, ground floor plan 667 Nottingham General Hospital 669 Radcliffe Infirmary at Oxford, plan of ground floor 672 South Devon Hospital, Plymouth 674 Royal Portsmouth, Portsea and Gosport Hospital 675 Berkshire County Hospital at Reading, plan of 1st floor 677 Salisbury Infirmary 678 Salop Infirmary 680 Royal South Hants Infirmary, Southampton 681 Stafford General Infirmary 682 Taunton and Somerset Hospital 684 Whitehaven Hospital 685 Hants County Hospital, Winchester, plan of ground floor 688 South Staffordshire General Hospital, Wolverhampton 689 Worcester Infirmary, plan of ground floor 691 York County Hospital
Special Hospitals 726 Hospital for Sick Children in Great Ormond Street 728 Dreadnought Hospital Ship 729 Haslar hospital, block plan 731 Royal Victoria Hospital, Netley 731 Hospital for consumption and Diseases of the Chest {Brompton} 732 London Fever Hospital, plan of ground floor 737 Newcastle Fever Hospital 737 Small Pox Hospital {Highgate Hill} 739 York Road Lying-in Hospital {London} 740 Liverpool Lying-in Hospital 740 Margate Sea-Bathing Infirmary 741 Southport Convalescent Hospital
More Baths
The Hospitals Investigator No.4 drew attention to how many lunatics it was possible to get into one change of bath water. It now emerges that lunatics were not the only victims of this economy. At the Royal Berkshire Hospital at Reading in 1870 they managed to wash, if that is the correct word, at least eight patients in one change of water. The full number is not known, because it was only the eighth patient who complained. The reason appears to be that it took ten minutes to fill the bath and another ten minutes to empty it again, and the hospital porter did not have time to do this.
Several firms are now known to have provided wood and iron hospital buildings, especially in the early years of he twentieth century, although their hospitals and chalets are hard to find or identify. So far the list includes the following:
Humphrey’s of Knightsbridge, (a catalogue of 1900 was located by the York office team). Several of their hospitals survive. Boulton and Paul of Norwich, who were still in business (in 1992) selling garden shelters that are almost indistinguishable from sanatorium chalets. Early chalets have been found as far away as Plymouth. {The company was taken over in 1997} Portable Building Company of Manchester, who provided a sanatorium for the Nottingham Association for the Prevention of Tuberculosis in about 1900. Hygienic Constructions and Portable Buildings Ltd. who supplied the Homerton College Sanatorium in 1913. This weatherboarded building still (1992) stands. Wire Wove Roofing Company of London made tuberculosis chalets. G. W. Beattie of Putney advertised their New Venetian Shelter, for tuberculous patients, in 1913. Kenman and Sons of Dublin, who sold tuberculosis chalets in 1913.
Not a hospital, but a temporary building that reflected the popularity of open-air living, this is taken from the rather wonderful Broadland memories blog
We visited the former Atkinson Morley Hospital in 1992 as part of the RCHME Hospitals Project. It was then still functioning as an acute hospital, specialising in brain surgery. The hospital closed in 2003 and remained empty and decaying for more than ten years. It is currently being converted into apartments by Berkeley Homes. It was designed as a convalescent home in conjunction with St George’s Hospital, Westminster, and was built in 1867 with generous funds left by Atkinson Morley, for the purpose of ‘receiving and maintaining and generally assisting the convalescent poor patients from St George’s Hospital’ in Westminster (Kelly, 1887). Atkinson Morley, the proprietor of the Burlington Hotel in Cork Street, Burlington Gardens, London, died in 1858 a wealthy man. He left a number of bequests to his relatives and friends and also for charitable purposes. These included the establishment of surgical scholarships at University College, a fund for the widows of tradesmen from St James’s parish in Westminster, and gifts of £1,000 each to Queen Charlotte’s Lying-in Hospital, the Lock Hospital, St Mary’s Hospital at Paddington, and the Royal Sea-Bathing Infirmary at Margate.
In the terms of Morley’s will, the residue of his property was to be allowed to accumulate for five years before being applied to the building of the hospital. The foundation stone was laid on 25 July 1867, and the hospital was opened on July 14 1869, the anniversary of Morley’s death. There was not the usual elaborate ceremony on the occasion, as the governors of St George’s Hospital, who acted as the trustees of Morley’s bequest, felt that it would be inappropriate to spend any of the new hospital’s funds on such an event. It is unclear which architect should be credited with the design of the hospital. Edward and John Kelly seem to have been acting as architects to the hospital from 1866-7 and John Crawley took over in 1867-70.
Second Edition OS Map 1899 (Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland )
The hospital was built on Copse Hill, on a site which sloped gently to the south. Built of stock brick, with black and white brick string courses and white brick window heads, it was of two storeys and basement and was designed on a T-shaped plan.
Floor plan of Atkinson Morley Convalescent Home from H. C. Burdett’s Hospital and Asylums of the World, 1893. This shows the basement plan of the north block (at the bottom of the plan) which, because of the sloping site, was the ground floor of the main south block (at the top of the plan)
This shows the ground/first floor plan. The wards are of the Nightingale type, although later convalescent homes often departed from the pavilion plan for something more homely, as the patients were no longer ill, and many were ambulant, and so pleasant grounds were also an important feature.
The first/second floor plan.
The main entrance and administration offices were on the north side, linked to the patients’ wing by the kitchens in the basement and the chapel above. The patients’ wing, which formed the cross-bar of the T, had a long south elevation. The basement here was in fact at ground level, due to the slope of the ground.
A portico, since removed, sheltered the main entrance which led into a square hall with the committee room on one side and a sitting-room for the resident medical officer on the other. Two corridors extended to the south, on either side of the chapel, which gave access to the patients’ wing, with the men’s accommodation on the east side and the women’s on the west. The chapel rose up through two storeys and was lit by arched windows with geometrically patterned glazing. There was a gallery at the south end, the altar being placed at the north end. The kitchen in the basement had nothing above it so that it could be provided with a large sky-light. Directly below the chapel were the stores, larders and scullery.
The central room on the south front, with a canted bay window, was Matron’s sitting room. To either side of this was a linen room and the Matron’s bedroom. On the exterior these central three bays were slightly advanced and rose up to an additional storey with a steep pitched roof ornamented by decorative iron brattishing. To either side of this central section were four bays standing slightly advanced from the outer wings. On the ground floor this area was occupied by children’s wards, and in the single bay between this and the outer ward wings, there was a small ward containing one bed. Below the children’s wards were dining-rooms for the patients, and in the centre a dining-room and day-room for the nurses. On the first floor there were staff bedrooms over the children’s wards and the bay-windowed room was a spare bedroom.
The outer wings, lit by five tall and narrow windows on each long side, contained wards on the ground and first floors and large day-rooms in the raised basement. The wards were furnished with between 15 and 22 beds and had a fireplace or stove in the centre. The sanitary towers were on the north side, as were the stairs.
The hospital was modernized, probably under the direction of Adams, Holden and Pearson, in 1931 (Allibone, F, Catalogue of Adams, Holden and Pearson drawings, RIBA). In the early 1940s the hospital began to take head injury cases to relieve the accommodation at St George’s. After its transfer to the NHS in 1948 it developed further as an acute hospital. The buildings suffered from the usual rag bag of additions, largely obscuring the original south elevation.
Architects John Thompson & Partners (JTP) were appointed by Berkeley Homes (Urban Renaissance) to work on the redevelopment of the Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon, London. Part of the site is designated Metropolitan Open Land. The site was previously owned by Laguna Quays until April 2010 when it was purchased by Berkeley Homes.
The present Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh was built in 1996-2002 as a PFI project, to designs by Keppie Design of Glasgow on a large green-field site south-east of the city, close to the A7 at Little France, by Craigmillar Castle, in a large area of open countryside. If you follow the A7 northwards, and cross over the A701, you reach its predecessor on the north side of the Meadows, fronting Lauriston Place.
Architectural perspective showing the north elevation of the infirmary fronting Lauriston Place, from RCAHMS
At the end of May 2004 The Scotsman reported that demolition work had begun on the old Edinburgh Royal Infirmary complex in Lauriston Place to make way for the £400m development. Contractors moved on to the site earlier that week to begin knocking down the Florence Nightingale nurse home, the boiler house and the dermatology ward (known as The Skins). The original developer was Southside Capital, which bought the site from Lothian University Hospitals Trust in 2001, and comprised a consortium with the Bank of Scotland, Taylor Woodrow and the Kilmartin Property Group. Planning permission was granted in December 2003, ‘after a battle with heritage watchdogs’, which included formal objections by Historic Scotland. By 2009 the development was being undertaken by a joint venture of Gladedale Capital and the Bank of Scotland.
This aerial photograph was taken in 2007 and shows the empty space where the Simpson Memorial Maternity pavilion and the nurses home formerly stood on the right, from RCAHMS
Quartermile is a mixed development, combining residential and commercial premises over the 19-acre site. The design team was headed by Foster + Partners as the masterplanners and Architects working with Richard Murphy Architects; Hurd Rolland Architects; CDA – Architects and EDAW – Landscape Architects.
After years of adapting itself to the needs of modern medicine, and having enjoyed decades of Crown immunity which enabled additions to be made to the buildings without deference to the usual planning procedures, the Infirmary was a bit of a mess. All these accretions have been cleared away and the ranks of ward pavilions are as imposing and uncluttered as the day they were first completed. But much more than just the clutter of late twentieth century lift towers and sundry infill buildings have been removed, other casualties include the listed Simpson’s Memorial Maternity Pavilion, the Queen Mary Nursing Home and the George Watson’s wing of the Surgical Hospital.
Walking round the site in April this year (2015), there are positive aspects to the works that have been done. Clearing away the accretions around the ward pavilions allows them to be appreciated, with open balconies once more, where residents can sit out and take the air, and communal gardens laid out between the pavilions. The unity of style of the new glass curtain-walled buildings acts as a foil or counter-balance to the stone-built Victorian hospital blocks, retaining the Simpson Pavilion might have interrupted Foster’s flow, but as it was on the edge of the site it could have provided an impressive termination, and provided a gentler transition between the new development and the tenements beyond.
Perhaps the most surprising loss is the eighteenth-century William Adam school building, George Watson’s Hospital, that had been retained by Bryce and about which he had designed his large infirmary complex.
Plans and elevation of George Watson’s Hospital, William Adam, from RCAHMS
It was not demolished without comment or protest. Even after the protests had failed to keep the building on the site, James Simpson made a plea for the building to be taken down stone by stone so that it might be rebuilt at some distant time.
The OS map of 1882 shows what was then the recently completed Royal Infirmary on that site designed by David Bryce and built between 1870 and 1879.
Extract from 2nd Edition OS Map reproduced by permission of National Library of Scotland
It was one of the first in Scotland to adopt the pavilion plan, widely adopted for new hospital buildings from the 1860s. Though it was pipped to the post by the Western Infirmary in Glasgow by John Burnet senior, designed in 1867 and built in 1871-4, Edinburgh’s infirmary was far bigger. The Western Infirmary in Glasgow was hampered by a lack of funds, which both delayed building work and reduced the scale of the project, so that it could only provide 150 beds at first. The new Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh had 600 beds, placed in eight 3-storey ward pavilions, with one large ward per floor.
This aerial perspective of the infirmary, from RCAHMS, makes an interesting comparison with the map of 1882 as it makes the hospital look as if it is almost in the middle of the countryside. It is apparently surrounded on all sides by green space, which of course was not actually the case.
This early photograph from across the Meadows, with its artfullyposed sheep, similarly evokes the image of the hospital set in a rural idyl, from RCAHMS
At the heart of the new hospital, Bryce incorporated a part of William Adam’s school building, George Watson’s Hospital, built in 1738 the same year that the previous royal infirmary building was begun to Adam’s designs. It is easily identified on the ground plan below at the centre, being the range that is slightly askew in relation to the alignment of the rest of the buildings. It was adapted to house some of the administrative offices and the hospital chapel. To its north and south the ward pavilions were disported, linked by single-storey corridors, with surgical wards to the north facing Lauriston Place, and the medical section on the south side. What the pavilion plan enabled were the primary requirements of separation and classification. Each ward was a self-contained unit, its occupants having no connection with any other ward, and thus hopefully preventing the spread of infection.
Plan of Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh, Wellcome Library, London (L0011802). Engraving from H. C. Burdett, Hospitals and asylums of the world, 1893
The ward itself featured windows placed opposite each other to promote the all important cross-ventilation, there were single rooms at the corridor end, which could be fitted up for a patient, the supervising nurse, a ward kitchen and sluice room.
This photograph shows the interior of one of the top-floor wards, taken during the First World War, c.1917, from RCAHMS
The turrets at the opposite end were to contain water-closets and a bath. These sanitary towers evolved over the second half of the nineteenth century to become ever more separate from the ward itself, with the introduction of a small lobby, again, cross-ventilated, between ward and water-closet. Often a balcony was strung between the towers, offering a small space to sit out for ambulant patients.
Each pavilion could serve a different classification of patient. As mentioned, here Bryce located the surgical cases to the northern pavilions and the medical cases to the south, further classification allowed men and women to be separated, but the possibilities were endless. It was this adaptability of the plan which made it ubiquitous for almost all types of hospital for decades: in hospitals for infectious diseases the separation was made more complete between the pavilions by omitting the connecting corridors.
Elevation drawing of 1872 showing the southern medical ward pavilions connected by an arcaded link corridor, from RCAHMS
Despite the apparent vastness of the new Infirmary it was not long before additions and alterations were necessary. Sydney Mitchell & Wilson added a nurses’ home in 1890, the laundry in 1896, and the Diamond Jubilee Pavilion in 1897. In 1900 they designed two new pavilions for ear, nose and throat and ophthalmic patients.
Drawing of 1896 for additions to the infirmary, this was the Jubilee pavilion and has been retained. It sits alongside the southern ward pavilions on the west side, from RCAHMS
The photograph above is of Sydney Mitchell’s Nurses Home of 1890, fondly known as the Red Home. A courtyard plan, offered an internal garden where the nursing staff could escape for some peace and quiet. It was originally intended to retain this handsome building, but the developers were given permission to demolish. It was argued that the building did not make a positive contribution to the local townscape, as its design, scale and form were out of keeping with neighbouring buildings, including the retained listed buildings. It was also considered to be ‘not a particularly good example of a building by Sydney Mitchell’, the neighbouring Ear, Nose and Throat pavilion being thought ‘a much better example’. More credibly it was claimed that it was not commercially viable to convert it. Demolition was permitted on the grounds that what would replace it would be of high quality and create a local public space at the heart of the site.
This is what replaced the Red Home, photographed in February 2015. ( ‘Lines’ by Byronv2 is licensed under CC-BY-NC 2.0)
The major addition of the twentieth century was the Simpson Memorial Maternity Pavilion constructed in 1935 to designs by Thomas W. Turnbull, with James Miller acting as consultant. An imposing steel framed building faced with concrete, as was the Florence Nightingale Nurses’ Home which was built at the same time. The Pavilion was officially opened on 1 March 1939.
The Simpson Memorial Maternity pavilion, photographed around 1940, viewed from the Meadows. Classically elegant, and a sad loss, from RCAHMS
The monumental nurses’ home built to the rear of the maternity wing, photographed around the time that building work was completed in 1939, from RCAHMS
The Simpson Memorial had its origins in the Edinburgh Lying‑in Hospital which opened in Park Place in November 1793. This was financed by Professor Hamilton and then by his son, James, until his death in 1839. It moved in 1843 and occupied five further sites before becoming the Edinburgh Royal Maternity and Simpson Memorial Hospital, in commemoration of the achievements in obstetrics of Sir James Young Simpson who died in 1870. The resultant building, designed by D. Macgibbon & T. Ross, opened in May 1879 and later became the School of Radiology, at No.79 Lauriston Place. The first ante‑natal clinic in Britain was opened there in 1915 as a result of the work of James Haig Ferguson. After the First World War buildings in Lauriston Park and Graham Street were acquired to try to combat overcrowding but this was not satisfactorily overcome until the new Pavilion was provided in the 1930s.
Aerial view of Claybury, undated. (posted on flickr by Jeroen Komen and licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0)
Repton Park at Woodford Bridge in Essex is a large housing estate that has been created on the site of the former Claybury Hospital, using many of the former hospital buildings and keeping the new buildings to a minimum, so as to retain the open southern aspect and the original south elevation of the main hospital complex. (The aerial photograph above shows the western half as it appears in 2015 on Bing.com) The hospital closed in 1997 and it was originally intended to build much denser housing on the site.
Claybury Hospital was recorded as part of the RCHME’s Hospitals project and was visited in August 1991 by three of the project team (myself included) together with our photographer, Derek Kendall, and a student who worked with us over the summer.
Claybury was built as the fourth County Pauper Lunatic Asylum for Middlesex. It was designed on an échelon plan by G. T. Hine in 1888 and built in 1889-93. The site included the modest country house, Claybury Hall, of c.1790, which was retained and extended for private patients. It was an extensive complex of largely two- and three-storey asylum buildings linked by single-storey enclosed corridors, constructed of red brick with terracotta ornament, dominated by the central water tower.
This view of Claybury Hall was photographed by Lil Shepherd in September 2010 and is licensed under CC BY 2.0 There is a painting of the house in the Government Art Collection painted c.1800 by Abraham Pether
A competition was held for the design in 1887 and Hine was selected from among seven specially invited architects. A notable and prolific designer of asylums, he had been responsible for planning the borough asylum for his native Nottingham (1877). It was following his success in the Claybury competition that Hine moved to London and subsequently was appointed consulting architect to the Commissioners in Lunacy for England. [The Builder, 5 May 1916, 331]
Claybury Asylum, ground floor plan from H. C. Burdett, Hospitals and asylums of the world, 1891 image ref: L0023315
In 1888 the plans for the Asylum were approved by the Lunacy Commissioners and in June 1890 the memorial stone was laid over the principal entrance of the administration block by Lord Rosebery, the first Chairman of the London County Council (LCC). The asylum was formally opened on 17 June 1893.
Claybury Asylum, first-floor plan from H. C. Burdett, Hospitals and asylums of the world, 1891 image ref: L0023316
Whilst Claybury had been begun as the fourth County Pauper Lunatic Asylum for Middlesex, it was opened as the 5th LCC Pauper Lunatic Asylum, following the Local Government Act of 1888 and the inauguration of the LCC. The LCC took over Hanwell, Colney Hatch and Banstead Asylums from Middlesex, and Cane Hill from Surrey. In June 1889 the Asylums committee was authorised to provide a fifth asylum for London by completing Claybury and a new building contract was drawn up in the following October. The building contractor under the LCC was E. Gabbutt of Liverpool. George Wise, who had been appointed Clerk of Works by the Middlesex Justices, was retained, as was Hine. A tramway was constructed to link up with the Great Eastern Railway for transporting building materials. In 1891 Hine was obliged to modify his plans following a decision to install electric lighting. This involved providing three additional boilers.
OS Map 1914 revision reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland
The site had been selected by the Middlesex Justices in 1886. It comprised the house and estate of Claybury Hall. The mansion of c.1790 was probably designed by Jesse Gibson (c.1748-1828), the District Surveyor of the eastern division of the City of London. [Essex Review, xxxvii, pp.99-108, cited in H. Colvin, Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1978] The house was a relatively modest two-storey building. The principal façade, facing south, was symmetrical with a central bow flanked by two outer bays, slightly advanced and contained beneath a shallow pediment. The bow at ground floor level was further defined by a semi-circular portico with coupled columns. The grounds extended to 269 acres and were landscaped by Repton. Burdett gave a description of the site, although at the time of writing the asylum buildings had not yet been completed.
‘Part of the land is charmingly wooded, affording shaded walks for the patients. No better site could be found for such a building, and although only 1½ miles from Woodford Station, and 6½ miles from Tower Hamlets, from which district it is expected most of the patients will be sent, the asylum will be perfectly secluded, and comprise in its own grounds all the beauties of an English rural district’. [H. C. Burdett Hospitals and Asylums of the World, 1893, vol.iv, p.345).
The asylum was placed on the summit of the hill rising to the north of the mansion house. The hill was levelled to provide a plateau of 12 acres giving a largely uniform ground-floor level from which some of the outer main corridors sloped to the outside blocks. Hine emphasized the importance of a flat site arguing that the additional cost was justified compared with ‘the perpetual inconvenience and extra cost of working a building filled with feeble, irresponsible patients, which has numerous steps on the ground-floor, up and down which food trolleys as well as patients have constantly to be conveyed’. [G.T. Hine ‘Asylums and Asylum Planning’ in Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, 23 Feb. 1901, p.16]
Claybury was designed on an échelon plan. This was a development from the pavilion-plan asylum which comprised a sequence of pavilions or blocks, each designated for a different class of patient. Each pavilion contained a combination of wards, single rooms and day rooms, together with provision for staff and sanitary arrangements. The pavilions were generally linked by single storey corridors, either enclosed or as covered ways. The échelon plan differed from the pavilion plan only in its general layout, which, as the term suggests, consisted of pavilions arranged in an arrow head or échelon formation. This allowed Hine to provide all the patient blocks with day-rooms that had a southern aspect and uninterrupted views.
At the heart of the asylum was the recreation hall. It was particularly finely ornamented, was 120 feet long, 60 feet wide, and 40 feet high, and was capable of seating 1,200 people. At one end there was a gallery supported on iron columns and at the other the stage, with an elaborate proscenium arch in Jacobethan style, topped by a bust of Shakespeare. The high quality of decoration in the hall was integral to the philosophy of asylum planning and design at this date, as The Builder noted:
‘The modern treatment of lunacy demands also more provision for the embellishment of the asylum than is to be found in the barrack like interiors of our older institutions. Hence the interior of Claybury Asylum is almost palatial in its finishings, its pitch-pine joinery, marble and tile chimney pieces, and glazed brick dados, so much so that some of the visitors rather flippantly expressed a desire to become inmates. The recreation hall, for example, is lavishly decorated with an elliptical ceiling, richly ornamented with Jackson’s fibrous plaster work, while the walls are panelled in polished oak, and the floors are to be finished in a similar manner.’ [The Builder, 30 July 1892, p.88]
It is notable, however, that the majority of the fine interior work was reserved for the more public areas, such as the recreation hall, the chapel and the administration block.
This photograph of one of the dormitories was taken around 1893 and shows a spartan interior, with the beds closely spaced. Note the fireproof construction of the ceiling. Photograph by the London &County Photographic Co. (c)Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images ref: L0027370
Above is one of a series of photographs from the Wellcome Library which look to have been taken when the asylum was newly completed. It shows a large dormitory of the type provided for chronic cases. Acute cases were housed in small wards with a large allowance of single rooms.
Photograph by the London & County Photographic Co. (c) Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images ref: L0027373
This view of a dining hall, presumably for patients rather than staff, although it is not so easy to tell as some of the decorative elements, such as wallpaper, curtains, potted plants, pictures on the walls, a hearth rug and the bird cage might seem a little luxurious for a pauper institution. However, homeliness and comfortable surroundings were recognised as important factors in treating mental illness. There is an almost identical photograph in Historic England Archives collection taken in 1895 by Bedford Lemere.
Photograph by the London & County Photographic Co. (c)Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images ref: L0027374
The photograph above is labelled as showing a ‘social room’. Wallpaper, pictures, rugs, and potted plants are all in evidence again along with the piano, and the shawls draped over the backs of the chairs might suggest that the patients have just stood up and moved out of view. The ceiling has the same fireproof vaulting seen in the previous photograph. It creates a slightly less institutional feel to the room than the exposed iron beams in the dining hall.
Photograph by the London & County Photographic Co. (c) Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images ref: L0027372
The caption for these two photographs (above and below) suggest they might have been a day rooms for the nurses. The one below looks more like a staff room perhaps, particularly with the stained glass in the end window.
Photograph by the London & County Photographic Co. (c) Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images ref: L0027371
The snap above was taken in 1991, and shows similar stained glass, with the coats or arms of the local borough councils. It was in the administration block, in the main stair window. This block also contained the board and committee rooms and offices for staff as well as sitting and bedrooms for three assistant medical officers. The corridors were floored with mosaic tiling, and a faience panel marked the entrance to the board room, which had oak-panelled walls and an enriched plaster ceiling. Amongst the collection of photographs at the Wellcome Library are views of the service areas, the laundry and kitchens etc. These blocks, to the north of the water tower, have all been demolished, along with the blocks for the attendants and nurses which originally flanked the recreation hall.
Photograph by the London & County Photographic Co. (c) Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images ref: L0027368
This shows the linen room, and below is the ironing room. The work was strictly segregated for men and women. At this date patients would have assisted with many of the duties involved in the daily running of the asylum.
Photograph by the London & County Photographic Co. (c) Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images ref: L0027377
Photograph by the London & County Photographic Co. (c) Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images ref: L0027369
While the women washed and ironed, the men worked in the kitchens. I think this might be my favourite of the photographs of the working side of the hospital. Except perhaps this last one. These must be some of the senior staff, I think, though they are not identified and look very young.
Photograph by the London & County Photographic Co. (c) Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images ref: L0027376
