The Great Hospital, Pt.4

Continuing our tour of Norwich's Great Hospital we come to one of many buildings in front of which Mike and I groaned and said things along the lines of "Oh, crap! Do you remember all the trouble we had with THIS one?"

This is Suffield Court, between St.Helen's and the river.
Originally built in 1937 around three sides of a glorious bowling green.
Inevitably, when they were originally built, each resident had but a single room (one window for each, with another row of rooms along the back) and there were no kitchens or inside toilets.
Residents ate in the Refectory (where a lot of them still do from choice and who can blame them? It's beautiful) and used the communal outside privies near the river.
Back in those days bathrooms were totally unheard of!

Still, it was a major step up from the cubicles still in use in Eagle Ward.

In the late 1960s things were improved a little in that each resident was allotted two rooms (one of which was split in half to give a small inside privy) and the remainder of the old folk were relocated to a new building our old boss designed (which is so execrably 1960s that I will never photograph it for danger of smearing his reputation).

Since Mike and I got hold of it, however, every second front door behind these porches has been blanked off and each resident has a big and beautiful living space (I'll show you where we rehoused the displaced folk in a minute).

Here's Mikey, reminiscing with me about all the hassle we had renovating these places.

On to the back of each bungalow we built a matching extension with a lovely big kitchen and bathroom in it, with fully accessible features for wheelchair and ambulant disabled use so a lot of the residents can cope without a nurse now.

That little square outshot is one of them, behind the somewhat scummy pool in the foreground which is not a swimming pool gone to seed but something far more fun.
From the late 1240s until quite recently The Great Hospital was granted rights from the king to herd swans.
Every spring a "swan-upping" was held where all the swans and cygnets from the river would be rounded up and the cygnets allocated to the different people in Norwich (72 in all) who had the royal right to eat them.

The Great Hospital's cygnets were then held in the Swan Pit - which is fed via two small creeks from the river - and were fattened on grain for the Master and the clergy to feast upon (remember the old folk in Eagle Ward subsisted on bread and gruel).
This practice only ceased in the 1950s.
The pit here has been partially drained for maintenance but usually it is a lot prettier.

Round the back of Suffield Court you can just about see where we are going next.

This is the rear courtyard of Suffield Court that we built to house the residents squeezed out of the front half. We tried to make it look as close as possible like the original with of course fewer porches as each bungalow is much bigger and quite luxurious.
We built much larger, two storey version a couple of hundred yards away in the direction Mike is looking (Young's Green) where folk from the Eagle Ward's cubicles and Holme Cottages (a similar set of bungalows to this) were rehoused.

Here's the view of the Cathedral from the corner of the bowling green.
That's the back of the Chaplain's House from yesterday's post in front of us.

Just around the corner are these cute little cottages on two sides of a green. The ones on the other side are residents' cottages but these ones hold the reception and some of the offices for running the hospital.
The third door up with the little plaque beside it is the "door of doom" where Mike or I would trudge to hear the Master moan about the builders or lack of money or just moan for the hell of it.

We've seen a little less than half of the hospital but as most of the rest of it was not accessible on this particular open day you'll have to wait until another year to see more.

In the meantime let's walk through one of the many little walled gardens and take a gander inside St.Helen's church, around which the hospital is clustered.

Being the church for the residents of The Great Hospital it probably has a bigger congregation than any other in the city due to its captive audience.

The vaulting and bosses of the Chantry Chapel are particularly lovely. They depict scenes from the lives of Jesus and Mary with the apostles around the outside and were carved by John Everard who was one of the masons working on the bosses in the Cathedral (take a looky here).

Above the altar hangs a copy of Raphael's "Transfiguration" from the Vatican, endowed by the owner of Geldeston Hall, a large country house I had the pleasure of totally restoring (one day I'll dig out the photos and scan them in … it's nice).

Mike calls this painting "Jesus on the Trampoline".
Hee hee hee hee hee!

Tomorrow - if you behave yourselves - I might take a wander with you around the scene in this last photo. That's the Cathedral on the left and St.Helen's and The Great Hospital on the right.
I'm standing on the riverbank here. The river swings in a big loop to my right around The Great Hospital and ends up the other side of the Cathedral. It's a great place to walk.