(Sea)Sick City
6.30pm Thursday 27th June 2019
6.30pm Thursday 27th June 2019
Westminster Arts Library
35 St Martins Street
London
WC2H 7HP
WC2H 7HP
Each ticket includes a medicinal serving of Hendricks Gin
Admission: Tickets THE SALON IS SOLD OUT
Hospitals are mysterious, self-contained places, but also central to our lives. They occupy a ritual role as the locations for the most extreme moments of human existence – birth, crises and death – as significant as churches once were. Yet, as buildings, they can be almost invisible, secondary to the functions they perform. 
In London more than 500 hospitals have closed, most during the past century. Those lost, from the showy high-Victorian complexes to the obscure, specialist hospitals that once dotted the city, retain a shadowy presence in familiar neighbourhoods. Now converted or demolished, their buildings have left clues to their previous life, if you know where to look. TOM BOLTON takes us on a trip through a London streetscape of abandoned and converted Victorian hospital sites, peculiar medical buildings reassigned to new uses, and gaps where ghostly invalids linger.
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In 1881 a smallpox epidemic began that placed huge strain on London's hospitals. The Metropolitan Asylums Board (MAB) decided to create more bed space by chartering two defunct wooden warships from the Admiralty; the Atlas, a 91-gun man-of war built in 1860 for acute cases, and the Endymion, a 50-gun frigate built in 1865, for use as the administration offices and stores. They were moored off Deptford Creek in Greenwich, near where another older hospital ship Dreadnought had been sited.
Climb aboard these and other medical vessels with ROSS MACFARLANE as he sets sail on a voyage across one of the stranger histories of the sea sick city.
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Dr TOM BOLTON is a researcher, and the author of four books, including ‘Low Country: Brexit on the Essex Coast’ and ‘Vanished City: London’s Lost Neighbourhoods’. His work has been published in the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and Londonist.
ROSS MACFARLANE is a Research Development Specialist at Wellcome Collection. He has researched, lectured and written on such topics as the history of early recorded sound, freak shows and notions of urban folklore in Edwardian London. He has led guided walks around London on the occult past of Bloomsbury and on the intersection of medicine, science and trade in Greenwich and Deptford.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ROSS MACFARLANE is a Research Development Specialist at Wellcome Collection. He has researched, lectured and written on such topics as the history of early recorded sound, freak shows and notions of urban folklore in Edwardian London. He has led guided walks around London on the occult past of Bloomsbury and on the intersection of medicine, science and trade in Greenwich and Deptford.
SALON FOR THE CITY is an ANTIQUE BEAT production