Thursday 14th May, 19:00-20:30, Guy’s Chapel, SE1 1UL
London Lost Hospitals – from Medieval Wards to Floating Fever Ships with Ross MacFarlane, in partnership with London City of the Dead.
Over London’s history, more than 500 hospitals have sought to aid the city’s population. Those lost, from ornate high-Victorian structures to obscure and specialist institutions, often retain a shadowy presence in familiar neighbourhoods. While out on the water of the downriver Thames, various hulking vessels were moored to provide floating care for quarantined citizens for whom there was no room on land.
As part of the city’s annual Medi-Culture Festival, join Ross McFarlane on a journey across a London streetscape of abandoned and converted Victorian hospital sites, peculiar medical buildings reassigned to new uses, gaps where ghostly invalids linger and downriver to search for these markers and lost limbs of the body of medical London past.
Many have left physical traces, some have regenerated into new forms of care giving, all have stories to tell. London’s lost hospitals are initimately intertwined with the history of our city and our changing approaches to health and disease.
Our venue will be the wonderful gothic chapel at Guys Hospital which is celebrating the 300 year anniversary of its fo
This event is produced by the brilliant London Month of the Dead.