All Saint's Hospital, formerly Medway Union Workhouse
Introduction
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.