Maudsley Hospital | >Re-PHOTO

Keep our NHS Public: Saturday 3rd March 2007 saw protests around the country against the increasing privatisation of the National Health Service and I managed to cover several of these events in London, a march in Camberwell followed by a march from Whitechapel to Hackney Town Hall where they joined others who had marched in Hackney. After finishing my coverage of these events I photographed the Hare Krishna in Soho and then went to the Photographers Gallery.

Keep our NHS Public - 2007 — *The march on its way to the Maudsley Hospital*

Here I’ll publish what I wrote back then on My London Diary with the usual corrections to spelling and capitalisation. Reading what I wrote below again now I think I was far too generous to New Labour. Although some MPs may have been well-intentioned I think the policies were largely driven by those with personal financial interests in private healthcare and other sectors that would profit from them. The NHS (and us) are still suffering from their actions and I have little confidence in the changes the current Labour government is now making.

Keep our NHS Public – Saturday 3rd March 2007

Although health workers and other trade unionists had called for a national demonstration in London, the union bosses declined to organise one, perhaps not wanting to embarrass an already beleaguered Labour government. What took place instead was a whole series of local demonstrations – including at least 7 in the Greater London area – across the whole country.

The overall effect was perhaps to make it more impressive, and certainly it seemed to get more coverage in the media that might otherwise have been expected, although there were few reporters and no TV crews at the three events I photographed (for some reason they preferred Sheffield.)

Largely well-intentioned attempts to improve the health service have failed to deliver as they should, with many services being cut. Part of this has been caused by a dogmatic insistence on making use of private finance with results that range from fiasco to farce, inevitably accompanied by long-term financial loss.

A second disastrous dogma has led to bringing in private enterprise to do the simple work at artificially inflated prices (they even get paid for work they are not doing) which has the secondary result of making the NHS services appear more expensive, as they are left to deal with the trickier cases.

*Kate Hooey holds the main banner with others on the Camberwell march*

Further blows to our national health service have been through the predictably disastrous IT projects; as well as going millions over budget, these have largely failed to deliver. Add the proliferation of management and expensive consultants, along with crazed assumptions in negotiating doctors’ pay leading to an unbelievably generous offer, and it it hardly surprising that the whole system is in financial chaos.

The government clearly lacks a real commitment to the kind of National Health Service many of us grew up with, run for the benefit of the people rather than to make money for healthcare corporations. The health service certainly needed a shake-up to reduce bureaucracy and eliminate wasteful practices, but instead new layers of both have and are being added.

*Outside the Maudsley Hospital – reading the letter which a delegation then delivered*

I started off in Camberwell, and had time for a short walk before the speeches and march began. It wasn’t a huge event, but there was strong support from those in the service, from patients and from pensioners, as well as local MP Kate Hooey. From Camberwell Green the march went down to the Maudsley Hosptial where a letter was handed in and I got on a bus and left for Bethnal Green and Hackney.

Going up the Cambridge Heath Road in the centre of Bethnal Green, I saw the march from the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel to Hackney in the distance. Unfortunately the bus was held up in the traffic behind it, taking almost five minutes to reach the next stop before the driver would open the doors and let me off. Some things were a lot easier with the Routemasters.

This was a smaller march than that from Camberwell, and after a few minutes I felt I’d photographed all I could, so I ran ahead and caught a bus for the centre of Hackney, arriving there just a couple of minutes before the Hackney march, which had come from Homerton Hospital, had returned to the town hall. I photographed them arriving and then the rally that ensued.

The Hackney march was a little larger, perhaps around two hundred, and there were quite a few speakers, including local councillors and representatives from the various organisations that had helped to organise the march.

A big cheer went up as the march from Whitechapel arrived, swelling the numbers in the square at the town hall.

Among the better known speakers taking part were George Galloway, whose speech lived up to his usual high standards of wit and common sense. Lindsay German, a hackney resident well known for her work for ‘Stop The War’ also spoke with feeling on the issues of health and the NHS. Several of the other speakers were old enough to have known the problems before the health service was set up.

As the meeting began to wind down, I caught a bus to Bethnal Green and then the tube to Tottenham Court Road. Just to the north of Soho Square I got to the Hare Krishna Temple just as the annual Gaura Purnima [Golden Full Moon] procession was arriving back from its tour around the area.

*Churchill and an entrance to a stairway with a red light*

From there I went to the Photographers’ Gallery to have a good look at this year’s photography prize contestants. I hope the prize goes to one of the two photographers on the shortlist, Philippe Chance or Anders Petersen. [Neither won.] Walking through Soho and Westminster I took a few more pictures.

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The previous post on this walk was Houses, Station, General Booth and more Houses.

I walked up Champion Hill to Denmark Hill and Ruskin Park, pausing briefly to take a photograph – not online – of what I later found to be a Grade II listed shelter before going further north towards the two hospitals further north.

*Maudsley Hospital, Denmark Hill, Camberwell, Southwark, 1989 89-2a-32*

Donations of £40,000 from psychiatrist Dr Henry Maudsley (1835-1918) went towards the establishment of a specialist hospital for the early treatment of recoverable mental disease, which was completed in 1915 when it was requisitioned for use as a military hospital, finally opening for civilian patients in 1923. Architects were William Charles Clifford-Smith, EP Wheeler and G Weald.

Although I’ve visited several of my family over the years in various mental hospitals, none has been in the Maudsley, which is the leading mental health training school in the UK. This was perhaps fortunate as it’s treatments have often been controversial over the years.

*Statue, Robert Bentley Todd, Kings College Hospital, Denmark Hill, Camberwell, Lambeth, 1989 89-2a-34*

Surgeon Robert Bentley Todd (1809-60) became a Professor at King’s College London in 1836 and took the lead in setting up King’s College Hospital in 1840 in Portugal St. The hospital moved to this new building designed by William Pite on Denmark Hill in 1909. The statue of Todd, financed by donations from his colleagues and friends was placed in the lobby of the Portugal St hospital in 1861, the year after his death, and moved here in 1913. The statue was not made to be displayed in the open air and has eroded.

Kings College Hosptial seems a rather random collection of buildings, few of any architectural interest. The photograph shows the statue in front of the Guthrie Wing, an Art Deco building dating from 1937 which is a private patients wing inside the main hospital, but was moved elsewhere on the campus when a new ambulance entrance and A&E department opened in 1997.

*Rose Garden, Gateway, Ruskin Park, Camberwell, Lambeth, 1989 89-2a-35*

I walked back to Ruskin Park and made a second picture of the Grade II listed shelter from the Rose Garden, which was looking a little sad, with no blooms but just the pruned growths with the odd leaf remaining. The shelter and its flanking walls was Grade II listed as long ago as 1951 and was built in the late 18th century as a part of the house which once stood here.

John Ruskin (1819-1900) moved to Herne Hill when he was five and the family moved to 163 Denmark Hill in 1842. The following year the first volume of his influential Modern Painters was publishing, promoting the work of JMW Turner. In 1871 he sold the house on Denmark Hill and it was demolished in 1949. Ruskin Park opened in 1907.

One of the few volumes I saved from my father’s books after his death was his copy of ‘WORK; FROM THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE’ by John Ruskin, a miniscule volume designed to fit the waistcoat pocket of a working man and published I think in the 1920s when my father was just such a young working man in his 20s. This roughly 3″ by 4″ book is the text of a lecture he delivered to the Working Men’s Institute in Camberwell in 1865.

Saint Faith's Church, Red Post Hill, Dulwich, Southwark, 1989 89-2a-25 — *Saint Faith’s Church, Red Post Hill, Dulwich, Southwark, 1989 89-2a-25*

I walked on southwards on Denmark Hill and then turned down Sunray Avenue to go down Red Post Hill. Early street direction signs were often painted red and one on the crossroads at the top of this road giving distance and directs to nearby villages was here by the mid-eighteenth century. It became a well-known local landmark by the 1800s, and the street it was at the top of was renamed from Ashpole Road (possibly also a reference to the post which could have been made from ash, a strong and durable wood) to Red Post Hill soon after. The post disappeared probably in the mid-nineteenth century, but in 2010 a new red post, the only one in London, was placed on the corner.

St Faith’s Church, North Dulwich began as an attractive Arts & Crafts church hall in 1908 which is now the neighbouring St Faith’s Centre. The church a large and rather plain brick box was only built and consecrated in 1957. On its west end is the sculpture at the right of my picture of Christ on the Cross with St John the Evangelist and St Mary Magdalene by Ivor Livi. The church no longer has what appears to be an excessively large flagpole.

*House, Red Post Hill, Dulwich, Southwark, 1989 89-2a-11*

The road has a number of large suburban houses, including a row of similar semi-detached houses to this detached property and its neighbour close to North Dulwich Station.

*Bistro Italiano, restaurant, East Dulwich Grove, Dulwich, Southwark, 1989 89-2a-12*

I don’t think Italian bistros were common – certainly not in the areas of London which I knew well, but I think this one stood out for the crudeness of its lettering and strange letter-spacing.

*Dulwich Hospital, East Dulwich Grove, Dulwich, Southwark, 1989 89-2a-13*

Like many hospitals, Dulwich Hospital began life as a workhouse infirmary, built for the Guardians of the Poor of the parish of Southwark St Saviour and opened in 1887, though the building has the date 1886 at left. It became a military hospital in the First World War and in 1921 was renamed Southwark Hospital, becoming Dulwich Hospital ten years later.

The ward buildings in this picture were demolished around 18 months ago.

*Dulwich Hospital, East Dulwich Grove, Dulwich, Southwark, 1989 89-2a-15*

The land for building the infirmary was sold with the stipulation that the public building erected “should be of an ornamental character” and local architects Henry Jarvis & Son did their damndest, though not entirely to my taste, receiving praise in the local press at the time. The hospital was built with a central adminstration building and long pavilions of ‘Nightingale Wards’, long narrow rooms with large windows for light and ventilation with beds along both sides. I spent around ten days in a similar ward in St George’s Tooting shortly before it was closed twenty years ago.

Until fairly recently this was still Dulwich Community Hospital, though most medical services had ceased in 2005. Part of the hospital has been demolished to build a school and health centre, but the buildings in this picture are still there.

To be continued. My account of this walk from 5th February 1989 began with A Pub, Ghost Sign, Shops And The Sally Ann.

Tag: Maudsley Hospital

Keep our NHS Public – 2007

Keep our NHS Public – Saturday 3rd March 2007

Denmark Hill, Ruskin and on to Dulwich