What the doctors ordered: the early history of the London Hospital, 1740–78

The planning, design and construction of a purpose-built home for the London Hospital spanned over thirty years. The surviving building bears little resemblance to the plain, practical hospital built in open fields south of Whitechapel Road between 1752 and 1778. Its Georgian core has been concealed by numerous extensions; by the 1940s the hospital was effectively a sprawling ‘small town’. Little is known about its architect, Boulton Mainwaring, whose modest career caused George III to remark that he was merely ‘some tradesman’, and has fostered doubt that he could have been sole designer of the hospital. Research carried out for the Survey of London has clarified that Mainwaring played a pivotal role in securing a site and designing a new building, yet has also revealed that the London Hospital’s architectural history was shaped by a network of collaboration. The collaborative energy behind the scenes of great building projects is rarely glimpsed in surviving records, and much less written about as a topic of interest. This account of the early history of the London Hospital analyses its first ambitious building project and recognises the multiple voices which guided it to completion, from the charity’s surveyor, medical minds and governors to a charismatic bishop memorialised as an ‘Institutor of Infirmaries’.