2011 Streak 126: Run - 4.5 miles, Time - 1hr 20min, Weather - Hot and still like summer
 |
| Monument Harefield Village Green |
The day was spent in and around Harefield Hospital, as my wife needed some tests. Whilst she was being processed I spent my time walking around the village and reading.
The walk was exceptionally pleasant, across meadows full of buttercups, down pathways through trees, and along the canal. It was rural and airy with fields, woods, lakes and waterways. The day was sunny, with that warm lazy feel which encourages you to step back and look around in a pleasantly hazy way and listen to the birdsong. It was hard to believe it was inside the M25.
But the walk made it perfectly clear why the hospital was where it was. It was built in the 1930s as a TB sanatorium at a time when there was no cure and the only treatment was isolating sufferers and exposing them to as much fresh air and sun as possible. (The wards for example are built in a long south facing curve, of narrow depth so all the patients beds would be sunny). The location was therefore perfect - close to London but isolated and a world away.
It is strange to look at the hospital buildings and their design philosophy and know that they were trying to make the best of helplessness. As little as 70 years ago medical science was primitive and before the invention of antibiotics little could be done to fight very many infections.
One of the great tenets of modernist design is that form follows function and you can see that in this building, which also has a chapel and concert hall. people were here to rest up in the faint hope they might recover, but more likely die.
The hospital is now a modern, specialist facility but I like it that you can still see what it was.
No comments:
Post a Comment