There’s an old view of the London Hospital, around the time it was built in the 1750s, that shows it standing like a stately home, symmetrical, classical and serene, in fields on which an expanding city encroaches. Even the Whitechapel Mount, a gigantic pile of rubble and dung that loomed over one end of the new building, somehow looks in this image like a landscape feature on a gentleman’s estate.
Life has since swirled round it and through it, over the quarter-millennium in which the East End of London became (then ceased to be) a churning industrial leviathan, built up, blitzed and rebuilt, that generated world-famous legends of deprivation and human resilience – the story of Joseph Merrick, the elephant man, for example, who spent the last years of his short life in the hospital. Through all of which, a bit battered and dis-arranged, the old hospital building, like an admiral on a shot-to-pieces deck, has retained something of its original aura and poise.
