Location, Location 2

Whereas “old Bethlem was built over a regularly blocked common sewer”, as we reported on this thread in January, new Bethlem (built in 1676 half a mile to the west at Moorfields, on the south side of what is now Finsbury Circus) “suffered from subsidence upon the site of the old city ditch, used as a dump for rubbish and waste”.¹ Yet this unpromising fact was invisible to the building’s first admirers. Robert Hooke’s Bethlem Hospital at Moorfields was “London’s first great public construction in half a century [after the Royal Exchange and the Custom House]… surpassing the other two in size, stylishness, ornament and, not least, superb siting”, ² the Moorfields area then being known for the relatively pure (and, it was supposed, restorative) quality of its air. It was built on a strip of land 740 feet wide and 80 feet deep, which Bethlem’s Governors had secured on a 999-year lease at a nominal rent from the City of London. “Most fundamental to understanding” its architectural grandeur, according to the historian Christine Stevenson, “is the [Bethlem] Governors’ conception of Hooke’s building as the home of an ancient Christian charity, one all the more noble because [it was thought that] its recipients could not be grateful nor, indeed, comprehend the nobility of the building”.³ The irony of this was not lost on seventeenth century commentators, one of whom wrote cynically:

“Bedlam is a pleasant Place, that it is, and abounds with Amusements; the first of which is the building so stately a Fabrick for Persons wholly unsensible of the Beauty and Use of it: the Outside is a perfect Mockery to the Inside, and Admits of two Amusing Queries, Whether the Persons that ordered the Building of it, or those that inhabit it, were the maddest?”⁴

However dramatic the siting of the building, however admirable its architectural aspirations, by the end of the eighteenth century considerations such as these had been overtaken by pressing engineering concerns. “Want of skill or attention are obvious in the carpentry of the walls and floors, below the roofs; there being no bond, or tyes, between the several parts, which should have been strongly connected”, wrote James Lewis, the Hospital’s Surveyor, in 1800 – or, as Christine Stevenson puts it, “Nothing aside from the tie-beams…actually joined the front to the back. No floor was level, no wall upright.”⁵ In the opinion of Lewis, “the present condition of the building is not in such a state as to warrant any other repair to be made thereto, than to preserve it…by such works as may be requisite…it is incurable.”⁶ With over 85% of their 999-year tenure remaining, Bethlem’s Governors were obliged to contemplate another move.

¹ Jonathan Andrews et al, The History of Bethlem (Routledge, 1997), p. 206.

²ibid., pp. 230-231.

³ibid., p. 252.

⁴ …cited in ibid., p. 232.

⁵ibid., p. 252.

⁶ James Lewis, Report respecting the present state and condition of BethlemHospital (London, 1800).

Bethlem in the News… and an Open Day at Warlingham Park

The history of Bethlem, in relation to two of the Hospital’s former sites, has appeared in the news on several recent occasions. Many of our readers will, I’m sure, have seen the reports in early April on the discovery of as many as a thousand skeletons, unearthed by archaeologists close to Bethlem’s original site on Bishopsgate, outside the City walls. The Hospital was located here from 1247 until it moved to a new building in nearby Moorfields, designed by Robert Hooke, in 1676. This grand baroque building dominated the area until its closure in 1815

The BBC posted a map showing an area labelled “Bethlehem Churchyard,” located to the side of Moorfields (an unlabelled space between Moorfields and the red circle on the (later) map below), indicating this to be the site where the skeletons were found. While it was suggested that this formed the Hospital’s burial ground, this was not, in fact, the case. Research on the first Hospital, the Priory of St Mary of Bethlehem, has indicated that this relatively open site was closely connected with the surrounding parish, which was built up around it. In Chapters in the History of the Insane (1882), Daniel Hack Tuke cites the creation of a new churchyard from part of the hospital’s grounds, on the Moorfields side, in 1569. This churchyard was used “for burial in case of such parishes of London as wanted ground convenient”: lack of space in City churchyards was a common problem by this time. Patients admitted to Bethlem were usually recommended by their local parish officer: that parish (or the patient’s family) was thus responsible for the burial of those who died in the Hospital. Although it is not impossible that some of these individuals were buried in the “New Churchyard near Bethlem” (as it was initially named), they were no more likely to be buried here than any other London resident. Moreover, the number of patients in the early Hospital was tiny: in 1598, there were just twenty inmates, so a thousand skeletons would be a somewhat surprising legacy!

The Hospital’s move in 1676 allowed for an expansion, with about 80 patients now admitted per year (there was always a waiting list, between about 200 and 320 patients). An article in The Australian recently suggested, rather misleadingly, that “England’s oldest psychiatric institution is up for sale.” The article refers to the sale of Salisbury House, built in 1901 on the side of Finsbury Circus, formerly the new Hospital in Moorfields. Having moved twice more since the early nineteenth century, Bethlem Hospital has, however, not been sold off, and remains in its current location in Beckenham, Kent.

What is not true of Bethlem – that it maintained a cemetery for its patients, and that it has been closed and sold off – is, however, true of one of its sister institutions, Warlingham Park Hospital. This hospital was opened in 1903 to accommodate the Borough of Croydon’s ‘pauper lunatics’, and closed in March 1999, by which time responsibility for Croydon mental health services had passed to the (then) Bethlem and Maudsley NHS Trust. Residential housing now occupies the site of the hospital, but not of the cemetery, which is now disused. This is not the place to recount the history of Warlingham Park Hospital – we hope that by the end of this year there will be a section of the Archives & Museum website devoted to doing just that – but blog readers may be interested to know that next Sunday, 15 May 2011, there will be an Open Day at Warlingham Park’s cemetery.