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.

The Great Hospital, Pt.3

First up, I'd like to wish all my yummy, sexy, smart, funny and/or just plain odd blogpals an intercoursingly Happy New Year.
Here's to 2009 being less sucky than the shitbag of a year we got stuck with last time.

Now that's out of the way I shall continue boring the pants off you with my tour of The Great Hospital in Norwich.
Today we come down the twisty old rickety oak stairs from Eagle Ward and emerge in the delightful and romantic cloisters.

Although the hospital was originally a monastic institution (hence the cloisters) both it and the neighbouring Cathedral managed to survive the dissolution of the monasteries.
The Cathedral achieved this by becoming a secular college, a function it still carries out today with the Norwich School occupying the old monastic buildings but the hospital came under threat from speculators.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
The state to this day loves to privatise previously public institutions and leave them at the mercy of asset strippers and crapitalist profiteers and it was much the same in the Reformation.
Only the city's noble history of riot and righteous rebellion against royal greed prevented the hospital - together with the Cathedral, Blackfriars and St.Andrews - from the destruction that befell most of the country's other monasteries.

The city formed a Corporation (still going strong) and began a strenuous action to save these institutions.
Being at that time England's second city Norwich fortunately had the balls and the bluster to kick out the king and his crapitalist cronies and as a result all four of our beautiful monasteries are - as this one - still beautiful and unsullied.

In contrast to the pitiful accommodation in Eagle Ward, married elderly couples were given much grander retirement homes.
You'll notice a couple of doormats to the left of this photo. They are the front doors to two of the houses opening onto the cloisters.

In the dark on the right of this photo you can just make out the front door of my favourite house in the whole hospital.
The door with the light shining through it on the left leads to the Refectory, which we shall peer into in a minute or two.

This is the back half of the two houses on that side of the cloisters. What a wonderful place to live out your last years.
About a hundred yards behind me here is the river and just the other side of St.Helens' church is the Cathedral with the city beyond.
Thank goodness this place hasn't fallen into the hands of developers and is still going strong.

This is the east side of the cloisters with offices behind the wall on the right.

And here is the north side with those two fabulous houses opening into the cloisters. I can only imagine the sheer joy of stepping out of your door every morning to take a stroll around this beautiful secluded little paradise.

This is the view looking left from where I was standing in the last photo. It is a tiny place and far less grand than the Cathedral cloisters but much, much nicer to spend time in.

The west arch leads from the cloisters to the Chaplain's House courtyard and St.Helen's House beyond.

Before we leave the cloisters let us peek in through the door of the Refectory.
One of my old jobs was the restoration of the minstrels' gallery you can see at the top right. For my sins I also put in the fire escape door underneath it.
The place is still used for meals so safety regulations state it needed yet another door. Sigh …

Here's some more of it. What a great place to have dinner, eh?
To put it into perspective for my Colonial friends: this room had already been the Refectory for almost two-hundred and fifty years by the time Columbus set sail (and three-hundred and twenty-one years before those pesky puritan "pilgrims" took their fundamentalist bigotry and intolerance and smeared its poison over the New World) and it is still in daily use.

Leaving the cloisters via the west arch we reach the courtyard and the lovely Chaplain's House. The house on the left is divided into more fabulous retirement homes.
Much as I like the Eagle Ward I would far rather live in one of these.

And this cute little house tucked away in the corner is The Master's House.
The Master of the hospital (there have been sixty-five Masters since 1249) runs the entire show and has one heck of a tough job as the whole shebang is funded by voluntary donations.
Good old Ray Kennedy (Hi, Ray) was Master for most of my time there, being replaced on his retirement by the splendidly clichéd batty barking madwoman "jolly hockey sticks" Dorothy North.

So we've seen the worst and the best of the accommodation offered by The Great Hospital; tomorrow we shall head off through this little alleyway to look at where most of the residents live these days and see some more of what Mikey and Dive used to get up to.

The Great Hospital, Pt.2

Righto … Now you've seen the shabby state that buildings can get into after almost a thousand years of neglect and have glimpsed our desperate attempts to preserve what's left, let us venture inside the east end of St.Helen's Church where we will discover one of the most truly strange rooms I know of.

Laydees and gentlemen, pray allow me to introduce The Great Hospital's "Eagle Ward".

That's a doozy of a ceiling, isn't it?
Any guesses as to when it was painted and why?
Hokay, I'll tell you.

Way back in the 1370s, Bishop Henry Despenser (known to himself and his thuggish apologists as "The Fighting Bishop" but actually a particularly nasty mercenary in Pope Urban V's mad Vatican Army) was put in charge here when Urban got sick of him.
The Black Death raged all about. In 1371 almost half of the population of Norwich died of it and the streets would have resounded to the carters' Pythonesque cries of "Bring out your dead!"
And following hot on the pestilential heels of the Black Death came The Peasants' Revolt.

Eventually things started to settle down again and in 1381 Despenser himself put murder, rape and pillage behind him and rebuilt the chancel as an act of thanksgiving for the failure of The Peasants' Revolt.
While he was at it he spotted an opportunity to suck up to some royal patronage and decided to spruce the east end of the church up a bit for the visit in 1383 of Anne of Bohemia, King Richard the Second's new bride.

The black spreadeagle was her family motif and so the existing chestnut boarded ceiling - already almost two hundred years old - was decorated with carved and gilded bosses and framework to form 252 separate panels, in each of which was painted an eagle.

Six hundred and twenty-five years later it is still in remarkably spiffy condition, having survived a fire during Kett's Rebellion in 1549 (see old Norwich posts), another one in 1888 and a clutch of German bombs just across the road in 1942.

Now that we've admired the spectacular ceiling, we can lower our eyes and discover something truly strange and more than a little disturbing.

This is the upper floor that we mentioned yesterday and since the mid 1600s, the luckier among the city's elderly and infirm were housed here.
The current cubicles are Victorian and we'll take a good look around them in a moment, but what is truly scary is that these - with no running water until the 1950s and toilet facilities down a twisty staircase and out across several courtyards and alleys down toward the river - were still in use in the 1980s!

For a while this had been a unisex ward for the women, though the central corridor was a communal "snuggery" for everyone to use and was by all accounts quite a social gathering place.

Let's take a peek into one of the bedrooms, shall we?
Other than the obvious additions of contemporary newspapers (and a great copy of The Magnet comic with Billy Bunter on the cover) these rooms have remained exactly as they were when the last occupants were rehoused in the early 1980s.
Note the chamberpot beside the bed. Even in the eighties there were no inside toilets here and it was a fair old walk in the dark to get to the outside privy.

This is the other half of the same room.
Until quite recently this was all the space each person had to live in, but after a critical report in the 1950s every pair of bedrooms had a communal parlour between them made from what had been a third bedroom.

Again, until the fifties when the big old heaters were put in, the only heat came from a small fireplace at each end of the ward where the old folk used to huddle together.
I can vouch from many, many visits for the fact that this place is fucking freezing on all but the hottest summer days.

Here's one of the shared parlours between the bedrooms.
The trunk under the table is where the women's personal belongings would be kept.

Not much space for two crotchety old biddies to share their last years in, is it?
Check out the thickness of that partition.
There was no privacy here.
But of course, a few hundred years back, when the poor of the surrounding parish were living twenty to a room in dank, rat-infested cellars this was the height of luxury.

At least the residents had lovely windows, even though standing near them is like standing in front of an open freezer.
The buildings in the background are some of the more modern accommodation which Mike and I refurbished and extended during our time looking after the place. We'll take a look at those later in the week.

Another bedroom and parlour.
I remember my grandparents' homes feeling very similar when I was a lad. Dark furniture and bric-a-brac.
It makes me feel comfortable, as those of you who've seen my house with its dark furniture and bric-a-brac may have guessed.

There was a "snug" at either end of the ward where folk could gather round the tiny fireplace and stave off hypothermia.
Other than the chimneybreast itself, the walls here are icy to the touch and run with condensation in the winter.
Of course with only two puny little fireplaces in this cavernous hall the pitiful amount of heat they generated all went straight up to the ceiling and out through the high windows while drawing cold air in where the old folk huddled.

Here's where our nostalgia started to really kick in.
This kind of stuff was commonplace when I was young. Indeed it was still in use here until only twenty-five years ago.

We used to have a mincer like that! And bars of Fairy soap!
Boy, I wish we still had our old scales. I used to love playing with those weights when I was a nipper.

The running water was installed in the fifties. Before that, the ward had a designated "water carrier" to lug pails of cold water up here.

Having no toilet facilites folk had to rely on chamberpots and bedpans. With the open plan layout of the place that must have been pretty nasty at times.

Not as nasty as some of this lot, however. I shudder at the sight of that surgeon's knife.

Here was where the food was prepared for the poor old dears. Again, it only recently got running water.

Having said all that, by all accounts the residents loved the place - except for the cold and the lack of an indoor privy. But they were well cared for and could look out north to the river and south over the Cathedral and lie in bed and gaze at the lovely ceiling. Apart from two disruptive old gents who were expelled in 1631, everyone seems to have been happy here.

Up until the 1950s they were fed a diet of bread and gruel but had fourteen "Meat Days" spread throughout the year.
On Mondays, Fridays and Saturdays suet puddings were added to the menu plus ten ounces of butter and twelve ounces of cheese per week to snack on between gruel.
Residents were also given two pints of The Great Hospital's own beer per day as the water was unsafe to drink unless you really fancied cholera. The hospital's brewhouse only closed down in 1865 after the busybodies from the Temperance movement insisted on being paid a shilling a week in lieu of beer.

The last photo today shows one reason why it is always so bloody cold in the Eagle Ward.
Downstairs are the unheated storerooms and workshop of the caretaker and all that separates this freezer from the ward above is thin floorboards and several layers of rugs.

So … That was the weird and wonderful Eagle Ward of The Great Hospital.
Spiffy, huh?
Tomorrow we shall feast on eye candy when we wander the cloisters.

The Great Hospital, Pt.1

Hokay, it's time for another wander around the older and odder corners of Norwich.
As some of you know, Mike and I returned yesterday to one of our old haunts, The Great Hospital.

This is a small part of it; St.Helen's Church (as was).
Back in the 1100s, the Parish of St.Helen was having a bit of a sticky time with the arrogant Norman monks in the Cathedral next door.
This wasn't helped by the fact that the good folk of the city, and especially St.Helen's and neighbouring St.Giles' wards got so totally (and quite justifiably) pissed off with the Norman Yoke that they did what Norwich folk have been doing regularly ever since: they rioted, kicked out the monks and burned the monastery and its gates (as documented in a couple of earlier posts that show the late twelfth century gates that the twat-faced bloody Normans forced the people to build to replace the ones they'd trashed).

Anyhoo, by 1249, Bishop Walter Suffield of St.Giles wheedled St.Helen's church and the surrounding land away from its previous owner, William of Dunwich - who was glad to see the back of it - and moved St.Giles' hospital into it; where - as "The Great Hospital" it has been going strong ever since.

Poor old William of Dunwich didn't have much luck after that as not many years later Dunwich itself fell into the sea and was swallowed up in a great storm.
Hey ho.

The Great Hospital itself was originally meant to care for the clergy of Norwich who had become too old, sick or pervy for duty, but mutated over the centuries to become what it still remains: a care home for the city's old and weird (Hi, Mister Plumbly! Yes, you know I'm talking about you).

Here is another part of it, looking from Bishopgate toward the Chaplain's House.

Before we peer inside at some of the older, prettier and distinctly odder parts, please allow me to reminisce about the east window of St.Helen's; bane of my life for many years.

Back in the seventeenth century, a floor was inserted halfway up the church (you'll see the result tomorrow) and the east window got rather fucked up.

As you can see from yesterday's photo, the bottom of the window disappeared completely and the rest of it up to the floor level got infilled. To cap it all, they built a fucking great chimney all the way up the middle of it.

The infill has been painted over and awaits further repair but at least the stonework has been repaired now and the wall stabilised.

Here's what it looked like when I surveyed it. Sorry about the quality of the pictures but these things are A1 size and it would take me days to scan them in and stitch them together so I took some crappy and out of focus photos instead.

The whole east wall back then had rotted away to such an extent it had the consistency of a dunked biscuit and was peeling away from the rest of the building at an alarming rate.
We scaffolded it inside and out and shored it up (it took many years to get the whole lot repaired) and Old Dive clambered up there and measured every single piece of stone and flint and rotten brickwork for the stonemasons to work out what they had to do.

Here are a couple of views of the inside (sorry, but my stupid camera didn't want to focus on these).
This one shows where the floor got inserted, the stairs and the chimneybreast …

And this one shows the parlous state of the stonework behind the chimney.

Here's some of the restored stonework. You see the gap between the window and the chimney? I had to clamber in there with a torch and measure it all.
Sheesh!

The stainless steel bracing may not be pretty but it stops the whole of the end wall falling out.

So that's a brief introduction to a little part of the hospital and one of the many cold, cramped, uncomfortable and occasionally painful things Mike and I had to do to keep the place going.
Tomorrow we shall start looking at fun and pretty (and weird) stuff.

If any of you are remotely interested in the older and prettier parts of Norwich and its glorious history of revolutionary rioting, click on the "Norwich" link at the bottom of this post and have a good rummage in the archives.