The Expansion and Remodelling of the London Hospital by Rowland Plumbe, 1884–1919

Abstract

The remodelling and enlargement of the London Hospital between 1884 and 1919 by the architect Rowland Plumbe modernised one of the largest general hospitals in Britain. The work almost entirely concealed the mid-eighteenth-century core of the hospital and extended its footprint beyond its immediate grounds, creating a sprawling medical complex on the south side of Whitechapel Road. The transformative effect of Plumbe’s work was centred on procuring sanitary and functional interiors. During an association that spanned 35 years, Plumbe designed well-ventilated wards, bright operating theatres, and highly specialised departments. Nurses’ homes were planned to preserve discipline and respectability, forming a cluster of tall dormitory blocks connected by covered bridges. This essay, based on research for the Survey of London, considers the medical expertise, organisational principles and social values that shaped a complicated building programme to upgrade a historic infirmary into a hygienic, well-supervised and efficient hospital complex.

KEYWORDS:

• Architecture
• East London
• Hospital
• Hygiene
• Modernity
• Whitechapel

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Peter Guillery, Harriet Richardson, Andrew Saint, Penny Sparke and Colin Thom for reading and commenting on drafts of this article. I would like to thank Helen Jones for her considerable work in redrawing plans. Richard Hill, Reider Payne and Kit Wedd generously shared insights from their research on Rowland Plumbe. Fiona Fisher, Patricia Lara-Betancourt and Rebecca Preston also offered helpful suggestions. Thanks are due to the reviewers for their invaluable comments. I am grateful to the archivists at the Royal London Hospital Archives (Barts Health Archives and Museums) and the Library and Museum of Freemasonry for their assistance during my research and permission to reproduce images. The Survey of London's ‘Histories of Whitechapel’ project (https://surveyoflondon.org) was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

ORCID

Amy Smith http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1116-0408

Notes on contributor

Amy Smith is a historian in the Survey of London. She has researched the Royal London Hospital and its estate for the forthcoming volumes on Whitechapel, and is currently assisting with preparing the next volume on Oxford Street for publication. She is also a doctoral candidate at the Bartlett School of Architecture, researching the architectural history of University College London.

Notes

1 British Library, Digital Store 1560/2985, An Account of the Rise, Progress and State of the London Infirmary (London: 1742), 6.

2 Royal London Hospital Archives, Barts Health Archives and Museums (RLHA), House Committee Minutes, RLHLH/A/5/4, 289.

3 RLHA, RLHLH/A/26/32, Programme for the Ceremony of Opening the Grocers’ Company’s Wing of the London Hospital (7 March 1876); RLHLH/A/5/37, 11, 32, 79–80, 84–5: St James’s Gazette, 18 September 1894; 23 August 1889: Morning Post, 30 July 1906.

4 Census.

5 RLHA, RLHLH/A/25/1, House Committee Chairman’s Papers.

6 H. Richardson (ed.), English Hospitals, 1660–1948: A Survey of their Architecture and Design (Swindon: Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, 1998), 3, 9, 11, 139: J. L. Heilbron (ed.), The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

7 Richardson, English Hospitals, 4.

8 Ibid., 10.

9 H. C. Burdett, Hospitals and Asylums of the World: Their Origin, History, Construction, Administration, Management, and Legislation; with Plans of the Chief Medical Institutions Accurately Drawn to a Uniform Scale, in Addition to those of all the Hospitals of London in the Jubilee Year of Queen Victoria’s Reign, Four Volumes (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1891–1893). In Richardson’s study of British hospitals, it was noted that literature on hospitals and their planning, such as Burdett’s study, provided an ‘impetus for change’; Richardson, English Hospitals, 5.

10 Richardson, English Hospitals, 9–11: J. Taylor, Hospital and Asylum Architecture in England, 1840–1914 (London: Mansell, 1991), 11–14.

11 Taylor’s chapter on ‘Upgrading the Older Hospital: Ingenuity and Transformation’ examines a wide range of modernization schemes; J. Taylor, The Architect and the Pavilion Hospital: Dialogue and Design Creativity in England, 1850–1914 (London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1997), 105–33.

12 Taylor, The Architect and the Pavilion Hospital, 126.

13 Ibid., 105–6.

14 Ibid.

15 RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/29, 478–9.

16 RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/36, 236, 331–2.

17 A. Reed and C. Reed (eds.), Memoirs of the Life and Philanthropic Labours of Andrew Reed (London: Strahan & Co., third edn., 1866), 308: Shoreditch Observer, 23 March 1867: East London Observer, 25 April 1867.

18 N. J. Cottingham was declared bankrupt in May 1854. In the following September, he was lost in the wreck of the SS Arctic on its voyage from Liverpool to New York. London Evening Standard, 9 May 1854: Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 29 October 1854: Evening Mail, 13 November 1854.

19 London Evening Standard, 3 April 1865: The Building News, 6 June 1890.

20 J. Ogden, rev. by M. Thomson, ‘Down, John Langdon Haydon Langdon-‘, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/37650: Surrey Comet, 24 January 1885.

21 Work undertaken by Plumbe’s practice included warehouses in Queenhithe for James Spicer and Sons, Greenwood’s clock factory in Clerkenwell, Unwin’s printing works in Blackfriars, and the Valley of Rocks Hotel in Lynton, North Devon. Plumbe oversaw designs for Noel Park in Wood Green and Queen’s Park village for the Artisans, Labourers and General Dwellings Company. Other prominent works included the headquarters of the Young Men’s Christian Association in Tottenham Court Road, the Temperance Building Society in Ludgate Hill, the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in Great Portland Street, and Napsbury Asylum. The Building News, 6 June 1890, 793: Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), Biographical file.

22 Painter-Stainers’ Company, List of Past Masters and Wardens <https://d2d3x0yswqvhr3.cloudfront.net/documents/139-1676-past-masters-portrait.pdf> [accessed 27 September 2018].

23 Builders’ Journal, 20 May 1896, 230.

24 RLHA, RLHLH/S/5/12, Letters from Rowland Plumbe (January 1903 to July 1904).

25 RLHA, RLHLH/A/24/7–9, House Governors’ Office file: Rowland Plumbe.

26 RIBA, Biographical file: London Daily News, 2 July 1862: Building News, 6 June 1890, 793: Builder, 1919, 381: Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, April 1919, 140–1: A. Brodie, A. Felstead, J. Franklin, L. Pinfield and J. Oldfield (compilers), Directory of British Architects, 1834–1914, Volume 2: L–Z (London and New York: Continuum, 2001), 383.

27 A bronzed terracotta bust of Plumbe by Sir George Frampton was donated to the hospital after his death by Nora Beatrice Dicksee, one of Plumbe’s daughters. The bust was placed in the surveyors’ office of the works department. RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/55, 158, 225, 244.

28 Brodie et al., Directory of British Architects, Volume 2, 280: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), P83/MRY1/1256.

29 RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/56, 72.

30 London Hospital Gazette (LHG), RLHMC/A/25/19, Vol. 16, 185–6. On the retirement of J. G. Oatley as hospital surveyor in 1933, his son Norman Oatley took the reins. Plumbe lived at 13 Fitzroy Square from 1868 to 1909; J. R. Howard Roberts and W. H. Godfrey (eds.), Survey of London: Volume 21, the Parish of St Pancras Part 3: Tottenham Court Road and Neighbourhood (London: London County Council, 1949), 60.

31 C. Hickman, Therapeutic Landscapes: A History of English Hospital Gardens since 1800 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2013), 125–6: RHLA, RLHPP/LUC/1, Papers of Eva C. E. Lückes.

32 L. C. Parkes, Hygiene and Public Health (London: H. K. Lewis, first edn., 1889): Parkes, Hygiene and Public Health (Philadelphia: P. Blakiston, Son & Co., second edn., 1890): Science, 1 November 1889, 301.

33 RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/44, Report of the sub-committee on the sanitary conditions of the hospital, 18 March 1890.

34 Builder, 4 July 1891, 18: Lancet, 29 March 1890, 714; 4 July 1891, 36–7.

35 Builder, 4 July 1891, 18: Lancet, 4 July 1891, 36–7; 29 March 1890, 714: Hospital, 18 November 1893, 110–12: British Medical Journal (BMJ), 4 February 1882, 152: RLHA, RLHLH/X/3.

36 RLHA, RLHMC/A/25/2, LHG, Vol. 4, No. 16, May 1897, 4–7: A. Keith, revised by D. D. Gibbs, ‘Treves, Sir Frederick, baronet (1853–1923), ODNB. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/36557.

37 Tobin’s tubes were a common method of ventilation, described in G. M. Gould’s A New Medical Dictionary as: ‘a method of ventilation of rooms by the introduction of air through tubes placed in the walls’. Gould, A New Medical Dictionary: including all the words and phrases used in medicine, with their proper pronunciation and definitions (Philadelphia: P. Blakiston, Son & Co., 1890), 440. Tobin’s tubes had been fitted in the Grocers’ Company Wing. BMJ, 22 July 1876, 122–3.

38 Hospital, 18 November 1893, 110–2: RLHA, RLHMC/A/25/2, LHG, Vol. 4, No. 22, January 1898, 125; No. 23, February 1898, 147.

39 RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/45, 216.

40 Personnel included Bertrand Drummond, Harry Edward East, Francis Roland Foster, Ernest Henry Major, Harry Reginald Poulter, Herbert Sydney Rhodes, and Gilbert Mackenzie Trench.

41 J. Gore, revised by P. Willis, ‘Holland, Sydney George, second Viscount Knutsford (1855–1931), ODNB. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/33943.

42 RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/49, 531.

43 RLHA, RLHLH/A/24/9, Building account on 6 June 1906.

44 Taylor, Hospital and Asylum Architecture in England, 20: P. Temple and C. Thom (eds.), Survey of London: Volume 52, South-East Marylebone (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017), 702: Taylor cites the example of phased construction at the Royal Portsmouth, Portsea and Gosport Hospital between 1894 and 1914 in The Architect and the Pavilion Hospital, 123–4.

45 RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/47, 192–4, 337, 402; RLHLH/A/5/48, 31: H. Richardson, ‘Humphreys’ Hospitals’, Historic Hospitals: An Architectural Gazetteer <https://historic-hospitals.com/2015/08/30/humphreys-hospitals> [accessed 21 May 2018]: Tower Hamlets Independent and East End Local Advertiser, 4 June 1898: Illustrated London News (ILN), 24 August 1901, 286.

46 RLHA, RLHPP/PAU/1/2; RLHLH/A/5/47, 402; RLHLH/A/5/49, 31.

47 North-facing operating theatres were customary in hospitals; please refer to Richardson, English Hospitals, 10.

48 RLHA, RLHMC/A/25/2, LHG, Vol. 6, No. 36, May 1899, 1–3; RLHMC/1/25/3, LHG, Vol. 8, No. 65, May 1902, 201.

49 RLHA, RLHINV/440: Bolton Evening News, 19 December 1908.

50 Richardson, English Hospitals, 10.

51 RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/48, 162, 270–1, 314, 367, 386; RLHLH/A/5/49, 42–3: BMJ, 24 May 1902, 1305–6.

52 RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/27, 62–3, 144, 154; RLHLH/A/5/48, 122, 173, 241, 314, 420; RLHLH/A/5/49, 42–3, 48: Pall Mall Gazette, 15 November 1904.

53 RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/48, 205, 209–10, 241; RLHLH/A/5/49, 42–3, 364–70; RLHLH/A/24/6–9: W. D. Rubinstein, M. Jolles and H. L. Rubinstein (eds.), The Palgrave Dictionary of Anglo-Jewish History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 823.

54 RLHA, RLHLH/A/24/6–9; RLHLH/A/5/49, 531.

55 BMJ, 28 July 1900, 269.

56 RLHA, RLHMC/A/25/2, LHG, Vol. 4, No. 16, May 1897, 2.

57 D. Neumann, ‘“The Century’s Triumph in Lighting”: The Luxfer Prism Companies and their Contribution to Early Modern Architecture’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 54:1 (1995), 24–53: American Luxfer Prism Company, Luxfer Prisms: Description with Illustrations (Chicago: American Luxfer Prism Company, 1897), 4, cited by Neumann, 25.

58 Richardson, English Hospitals, 36.

59 RLHA, RLHMC/A/25/2, LHG, Vol. 6, No. 36, May 1899, 2.

60 RLHA, RLHMC/A/25/2, LHG, Vol. 5, No. 27, July 1898, 36–7; Vol. 6, No. 36, May 1899, 8; RLHMC/A/25/3, Vol. 8, No. 58, October 1901, 41–2; RLHMC/A/25/2, LHG, Vol. 4, No. 16, May 1897, 2; No 17, June 1897, 21.

61 Lückes, Hospital Sisters and their Duties (Philadelphia: Blakiston, Son & Co., 1886), 45.

62 Burdett, Hospitals and Asylums of the World, Vol. 4, 65, 77.

63 Burdett, Vol. 4, xvii–xviii: Survey of London, Volume 52, South-East Marylebone, 701–2.

64 RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/11, 285, 323; RLHLH/A/5/15, 52.

65 Spectator, 1 September 1922, 20: A. E. Clark-Kennedy, The London: A Study in the Voluntary Hospital System, Volume Two: The Second Hundred Years, 1840–1948 (London: Pitman, 1963), 136–7.

66 In Burdett’s study, St Thomas’s Hospital and Westminster Hospital are also listed as having isolation wards for infectious patients; Burdett, Hospitals and Asylums of the World, Vol. 4, 132–3, 192–3.

67 Richardson’s study includes model plans of isolation hospital ward blocks published by the Local Government Board between 1876 and 1924; Richardson, English Hospitals, 140–1.

68 RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/35, 86; RLHLH/A/5/44, 457; RLHLH/A/5/45, 488; RLHLH/A/5/47, 8 August 1898, 207; RLHLH/A/5/48, 191–3, 215–6; RLHLH/A/5/50; 255, 455: LCC Minutes, 18 June 1907, 1269: E. W. Morris, A History of the London Hospital (London: Edward Arnold, 1910), 23.

69 Builder, 13 June 1903, 617: ILN, 20 June 1903, 962.

70 RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/48, 50.

71 Taylor outlined the sequence for outpatients’ departments and dispensaries, and referred to the arrangement at the London Hospital, in Hospital and Asylum Architecture in England, 130–3.

72 In 1895, Wilhelm Konrad Röntgen discovered X-rays, a type of radiation adopted widely for diagnosis and treatment. The pioneering Finsen Lamp, named in recognition of its Danish inventor and Nobel laureate Niels Ryberg Finsen, emitted light radiation to treat lupus vulgaris, a tuberculous skin infection once common in east London. The hospital’s first lamp was donated by Queen Alexandra in 1900 and initially installed in a single-storey shed located in the hospital garden. By 1909 the light department was considered by the BMJ to be the finest of its kind in the capital, with treatment machines for up to twelve patients powered by roof-top generators; BMJ, 4 December 1909, 1622–3: Richardson, English Hospitals, 11.

73 ILN, 24 August 1901, 286: BMJ, 4 December 1909, 1622–3: Lancet, 20 June 1903, 1759–1: Builder, 13 June 1903, 617: RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/47, 32; RLHLH/A/5/48, 83, 209–10, 522, 527, 532–5; RLHLH/A/4/24/7.

74 RLHA, RLHMC/A/25/2, LHG, Vol. 4, No. 23, February 1898, 142–3.

75 Burdett, Hospitals and Asylums of the World, Vol. 4, 77–8.

76 Plans for the layout of machines in the laundry list hydro-extractors, washing machines, ironing machines, wash troughs, wringers, rinsing and blueing troughs, rinsing tanks, starchers, box mangles, boilers, soap and soda boilers, and steeping tanks; RLHA, RLHTH/S/10/20.

77 Morris, London Hospital, 23, 243–7, 301: RLHA, RLHLH/A/25/1; RLHLH/A/24/7–9; RLHTH/S/10/20; RLHLH/P/7/3/19; RLHLH/S/2/29; RLHLH/S/2/30; RLHLH/S/2/98; RLHLH/S/2/99.

78 J. Hamlett, ‘“Nicely Feminine, Yet Learned”: Student Rooms at Royal Holloway and the Oxford and Cambridge Colleges in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Women’s History Review, 15:1 (2006), 137–61, DOI: 10.1080/09612020500440952: J. Hamlett, At Home in the Institution: Material Life in Asylums, Lodging Houses and Schools in Victorian and Edwardian England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015): J. Hamlett, L. Hoskins and R. Preston (eds.), Residential Institutions in Britain, 1725–1970: Inmates and Environments (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013).

79 Hamlett, At Home in the Institution, 163.

80 Hamlett, At Home in the Institution, 168. Hamlett also emphasised that both men and women at residential colleges enjoyed decorating and arranging their private rooms. Hamlett, ‘Nicely Feminine, Yet Learned’, 157–8.

81 Communal spaces such as living and dining rooms were also provided in women’s lodging houses of the period, examined by E. Gee in ‘“Where Shall She Live?”; Housing the New Working Woman in Late Victorian and Edwardian London’, Living, Leisure and Law: Eight Building Types in England, 1800–1941, ed. G. Brandwood (Reading: Spire Books in association with the Victorian Society, 2010), 93, 98–99, 108.

82 Hamlett, At Home in the Institution, 162.

83 Hamlett has noted that discipline in institutions often corresponded with patriarchal hierarchy, with supervision by ‘father and mother figures’. Hamlett, At Home in the Institution, 5–6.

84 J. Evans, ‘Lückes, Eva Charlotte Ellis (1854–1919), nurse’, ODNB. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/49192.

85 Census.

86 Richardson, English Hospitals, 34.

87 Evans, ‘Lückes’.

88 Evans, ‘Lückes’: E. C. E. Lückes, Lectures on General Nursing Delivered to the Probationers of the London Hospital Training School for Nurses (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1884): Lückes, Hospital Sisters and their Duties.

89 Census.

90 RLHA, RLHPP/LUC/1/11, Letter from F. Nightingale to E. C. E. Lückes, 7 June 1892. In this letter, Nightingale referred specifically to accommodation for private and district nurses.

91 RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/37, 11.

92 Lückes, Hospital Sisters, 111.

93 Ibid., 103, 111.

94 Evans, ‘Lückes’.

95 RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/46, 344–5, 385.

96 Lückes, cited by Clark-Kennedy, The London, 99: RLHA, RLHMC/A/25/2, LHG, Vol. 4, No. 23, February 1898, 153.

97 RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/45, 150–1, 377–8, 384; RLHLH/A/5/49, 335.

98 Taylor, The Architect and the Pavilion Hospital, 131–2.

99 ILN, 28 May 1887: RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/41, 477; RLHLH/A/5/42, 318–9; RLHLH/A/5/43, 188; RLHLH/S/2/102.

100 RLHA, Plans for the Alexandra Home, RLHLH/S/2/72; RLHLH/S/2/39; RLHLH/S/2/73; RLHLH/S/2/24; RLHLH/S/2/25; RLHTH/S/10/6; RLHLH/P/2/4.

101 RLHA, RLHMC/A/25/4, LHG, Vol. 12, No. 99, November 1905, 88; RLHLH/TH/S/10/23; RLHINV/752: LCC Minutes, 23 June 1903, 974: Morris, London Hospital, 314.

102 Cavell trained as a probationer at the hospital from 1896 to 1898, and worked on its private nursing staff until 1901: Historic England, List Description <https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1113060> [accessed 6 June 2018]: Taylor, The Architect and the Pavilion Hospital, 88–9, 131: RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/55, 384–5, 393, 508, 511, 519; RLHLH/TH/S/10/9; RLHPP/KNU/2/8/18: C. Daunton, ‘Cavell, Edith Louisa (1865–1915)’, ODNB. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/32330.

103 Lückes, Hospital Sisters, 197–8, 76.

104 Burdett, Hospitals and Asylums of the World, Vol. 4, xi: also cited by Hickman, Therapeutic Landscapes, 145.

105 RLHA, RLHMC/A/25/2, LHG, Vol. 6, No. 37, June 1899, 23–5: Globe, 3 July 1882: Graphic, 19 July 1884.

106 S. Williams, “Eden, as we know it, is a fertile and happy region situated in the heart of Whitechapel”: The nurses’ “Garden of Eden” at the London Hospital’, London Gardener, 18 (2013–14), 99–118.

107 Taylor, The Architect and the Pavilion Hospital, 114.

108 Ibid., 111.

109 Ibid., 12, 62, 106.

110 Taylor has noted that reworking at Southampton (1894) and Northampton (1907) was quoted at £200 per bed and £208 per bed respectively. A scheme for rebuilding Manchester Royal Infirmary in 1902 was quoted at £443 per bed. Estimates for the Newcastle Royal Victoria Infirmary ranged from £374 per bed to £536 per bed. Taylor, The Architect and the Pavilion Hospital, 124–5.

111 Richardson, English Hospitals, 11.