Built in 1849 on the south side of Chatham, All Saints'
Hospital was originally Medway Union Workhouse, replacing the
original Chatham Workhouse at the bottom of Chatham Hill near The
Brook, in Union Street.
The original workhouse is
widely believed to be the workhouse featured in Charles
Dickens' novel "Oliver Twist". Dickens himself lived nearby
as a boy, about 200 yards away in The Brook, and also in
Ordnance
Terrace, about a mile or so away. This photograph shows
the view eastwards along The Brook and Union Street from the
bottom of Slickett's Hill. The large building with the blue
front and yellow brick rear, to the right of the Tesco
store, is the new Gala Bingo Hall which now stands on the
site of the original workhouse. It is the latest of a number of
buildings on the site; after the workhouse was demolished, the
site was occupied by what became the "X-Brand" factory. This
was replaced by the Ritz Cinema,
which was later converted into a bingo hall. This building was
destroyed by fire in 1998.
All Saints' most recent role was as the main maternity
and geriatric hospital for the Medway Towns, which it performed until 1999. All of the patients and work previously undertaken at the hospital have now been transferred to Gillingham's Medway Maritime
Hospital, which was extended at a cost of 60,000,000 pounds
to turn it into the area's general hospital.
Photographs
As of 2pm on Friday 25th July 1999, the hospital ceased to be
owned by the Medway Health Authority. I was lucky enough to be
able to take some photographs of the site. I apologise in advance
that this page is at a very early stage of development, and that
I felt it necessary to actually get the pictures onto my web page
before I'd actually written the text to accompany them.
As a result, for the moment, I've divided the photos up into
sections according to the film they appear on, rather than by
subject or area. The total combined size of the images is over
5Mb, so it isn't really practical to download all of them onto a
single page. Hopefully it won't be too long before I get a chance
to organise them more.
Once I'd taken the photos and looked around the Internet, I discovered that there are lots of people who are fascinated by old and abandoned buildings. Here are links to some of them:
Bexley Hospital was built in 1894 as the "Heath Asylum", designed by renowned asylum architect GT Hine as London's 7th asylum, it was eventually closed in 2001. This fascinating site, started by two former members of staff at the hospital, describes the hospital's history and includes accounts from people who worked there.
The original workhouse is
widely believed to be the workhouse featured in Charles
Dickens' novel "Oliver Twist". Dickens himself lived nearby
as a boy, about 200 yards away in The Brook, and also in
Ordnance
Terrace, about a mile or so away. This photograph shows
the view eastwards along The Brook and Union Street from the
bottom of Slickett's Hill. The large building with the blue
front and yellow brick rear, to the right of the Tesco
store, is the new Gala Bingo Hall which now stands on the
site of the original workhouse. It is the latest of a number of
buildings on the site; after the workhouse was demolished, the
site was occupied by what became the "X-Brand" factory. This
was replaced by the Ritz Cinema,
which was later converted into a bingo hall. This building was
destroyed by fire in 1998.