A history of Hackney health: the past is always present

The local area is a phrase best said in a nasal, Ken Livingstonesque voice. Local history books, for their part, were once fusty volumes stuffed with dates and chronologies. Then came the sixties, which witnessed a flowering of cultural history, seeking to describe people’s daily lives, from their toilet habits to the design of cutlery.

Around this time, plans for high density, high rise council estates were unveiled. Local historical societies sprung up to defend old buildings these threatened. One such society was The Hackney Society, established 1967. Lisa Rigg, current project officer, points to a map of the streets around London Fields. “In the sixties, this whole area was full of cheap housing. Lots of artistic types came here and then realised the Council’s housing programme was going to demolish most of it. The Society was set up in response.”

The Society was instrumental in saving many of the Victorian terraces around London Fields. In so doing, it earned a reputation for subversion. Rigg says: “There was a notice in the Council offices saying staff weren’t to talk to the Society. All organisations go through their radical phase.”

Fast forward a few decades, and, while people have arguably never been hungrier for knowledge about Hackney’s past, the Society has fallen on hard times.

“For many years, we have not had any funding. We used to receive Council funding because we are their official planning consultee. We lost the grant about four years ago. I’m fundraising so we can get back to where we were.”
Plans to reverse the Society’s brief decline include a new project, “From Fever to Consumption – the Story of Healthcare in Hackney”. Benefiting from a £50,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, this will examine the development of local hospitals and GP surgeries in relation to medical advances.

Rigg explains: “The study will look at four institutions: The Mothers’ Hospital, St Leonard’s Hospital, the John Scott Health Centre and Hackney Hospital. The East End is known for its poverty and the poor health of its inhabitants. If we get funding from the Wellcome Trust we will look at ten more institutions, most of which have been demolished.
“Hospital buildings have never been seen as an iconic building type. I suppose people are interested to see how these buildings developed and why there were so many in such a small area.”

The Mothers’ Hospital, an institution for unmarried women opened by the Salvation Army in 1894, became Hackney’s main maternity hospital. It was closed when the Homerton opened in the 1980s. Rigg says: “Behind it there were isolation wards built in 1913, which were demolished in 1987. These were colonnaded, bungalow style, single storey wards, separated from the main building but linked to it via walkways. I believe the idea was that if there was an outbreak of an infection in one of these, it could be isolated.”

Though the Society is passionate about reusing old buildings, Rigg acknowledges this can be difficult in the case of hospitals. In a sign the Society has mellowed since the sixties, she says it is impossible to save everything.
“I think buildings make places special,” she says. “The housing to be built on the Olympics site looks sterile, but whether it will look like that in one hundred years time is hard to say. I don’t know what the streets around London Fields would have looked like when they had just been built by the Victorians. I’m sure people would have been outraged.”

The Hackney Society is looking for contributions from former nurses, doctors and patients of the four hospitals mentioned in this article. Those with memories to share can contact Lisa Rigg 020 8806 4003. www.hackneysociety.org