The lost hospitals of St Luke's

摘要

Few Londoners know the whereabouts of St Luke's, yet for much of the 19th century it was home to seven leading hospitals. In 1865 you could have stood on City Road, near the famous Eagle Tavern, and been able to see six of them. But during the 20th century all but one were to vanish. And it was not just the hospitals that disappeared. The district of St Luke's itself became invisible. This may have been the result of a deliberate policy to ‘lose’ one of the poorest, most deprived areas of London. Like St Giles (another area that became invisible), much of the housing stock was dreadful, with overcrowded ‘rookeries’. In the 1850s St Lukes had 245 people per acre, more than St Giles (221), Clerkenwell (170), Westminster (71) or Islington (30). The local Medical Officer of Health described the houses as ‘typhus nests’. Both St Luke's and St Giles were ‘dealt with’ by wholesale redevelopment that left them almost unrecognizable, destroying as it did both their architectural heritage and any sense of community.