The battle to halt the demolition of the Jewish Maternity Hospital in Whitechapel’s Underwood Road has united a disparate group of campaigners. For many East Enders, past and present, this cosy arts and crafts building is a symbol of East End community. The Jewish population of Tower Hamlets has largely dispersed over the last decades. But the will to connect lingers on, with campaigners using the early 21st century phenomenon of Facebook to battle for an early 20th century building.
Like any solid achievement, the hospital began as a dream. The dreamer was Alice Model.
Born to a middle-class family in 1856, Model became a pioneer in maternal and child welfare. Mother and child mortality were horribly high in Victorian times, especially in poor areas such as Whitechapel. Most births would take place at home, with what support there was coming from friends and family, and sanitation and medical care were almost non existent.
Model’s idea was for a proper system of support, where mother and child could be cared for both before and after the birth. Conversations with her friend Bella Lowy, a writer, teacher, communal worker, gave birth to the idea of the Sick Room Helps Society, where mothers could have a safe place to give birth, with nursing help at home afterwards. Pressing the wealthier members of the community for funds, the pair made the plan a reality, with mat and by the early years of the 20th century the SRHS was a huge success. But what they really needed was a permanent home.
A £5000 bequest by Mrs Ada Lewis-Hill gave them their start. Sir Marcus Samuel, the founder of Shell (who would become Viscount Bearsted) gave another £2000 to buy equipment, and Mrs Harris Lebus chipped in to furnish the home. A row of old homes in Underwood Road was demolished and in 1911 the new hospital (affectionately known as Mother Levy’s, after the administrator) rose in their place.
It wasn’t a grandiloquent building. The trustees spent Samuel’s money on medicine rather than show. Young architect John Myers designed a modest arts and crafts style cottage as the entrance to the hospital (it is this that campaigners are fighting to save, rather than the utilitarian body of the hospital). Model and Co wanted the building to be welcoming and “domestic”. Ironically it’s this very modesty of design that led English Heritage to reject calls to list the building last year.
There were three maternity wards, an operating theatre, four free bedrooms and two for private patients. In 1912, the infant welfare centre was added, with free milk for nursing mothers. The nurses also dispensed lessons in hygiene and thrift. The hospital again became a victim of its success, with demand far exceeding supply. By the time Queen Mary visited in 1916, mums were getting lessons on feeding and clothing their tots, and there were lessons on how to hand sew baby garments, and visiting nurses from the Queen Victoria’s Jubilee Institute would distribute clothes from charity collections.
In many ways, the hospital anticipated the long-overdue changes in health care of the 20th century. In 1918 it amalgamated with the Ladies’ Benevolent Lying-In Institution to provide more home services; then the Maternity and Child Welfare Act of 1918 saw improvements in antenatal care. Mother Levy’s had been there ahead of the act, and took an active role. In 1927 neighbouring buildings were taken over, and there was now an infant welfare centre and antenatal clinic and renamed the Bearstead Memorial Hospital (benefactor Marcus Samuel dying that same year). Midwifery services were improved again in 1937, again following the lead of independent organisations such as Mother Levy’s. Ironically it meant the old hospital was now too small.
In 1939, an extraordinary story appeared in the London papers, under the headline ‘Treatment refused’. Expectant mother Francisca Neumann had gone, in increasing desperation, from hospital to hospital in her native Vienna, in search of a bed – only to be told repeatedly ‘We can’t treat Jews here’. Eventually a mercy flight took her to Croydon aerodrome in south London, and thence to Underwood Road, where her child was safely delivered. She would be one of the hospital’s final guests. The hospital closed as World War 2 began, and the hospital would eventually reopen as the Bearsted Memorial Hospital in Stoke Newington, in 1947.
Neumann junior came at the end of thousands of births, with some famous East End names sprinkled among them. Composer Lionel Bart was born there in 1930, and playwright Arnold Wesker in 1932, delivered by Dr Sam Sacks, father of the neurologist and writer Dr Oliver Sacks. The old building, meanwhile, would pass to Stepney Council and first became the Mary Hughes Centre and Day Nursery, then a home for the Family Welfare Association. By 2011 it was in the hands of Peabody – long a provider of homes in the East End – which announced the controversial decision to tear Mother Levy’s down.
A stroll down Underwood Road throws the problem of the hospital into relief. The 1911 building now stands marooned amid modern semis, its contemporaries long cleared in the developments of the latter half of the 20th century. The street, nestling between Vallance Road and Brick Lane, was once the heart of Jewish Whitechapel, but that community has dispersed and now the population is predominantly Bangladeshi. So is the Jewish hospital a building whose time is past? Is it not time to move on and redevelop the site?
Clive Bettington, chair of the Jewish East End Celebration Society, strongly disagrees. “The building may not be architecturally of the highest order, but it’s a vital link to the old Jewish East End. We should honour our past.” And other East Enders seem to agree. Comments on the online petition* speak volumes. “Another building about to be sacrificed. It’s criminal”, says one. Another complains that “enough were destroyed during World War 2. Leave it alone.”
Speaking to passers-by on a cold December evening I uncovered an unsurprising lack of knowledge about the building and its history (old buildings tend to fade into the landscape for most of us) but a heartening enthusiasm for saving it. Sharif, pausing to look at the facade as he hurried against the winter wind up to Brick Lane, seemed baffled that anyone should want to pull the hospital down. “It’s part of our history – of course we should keep it!” And perhaps that’s the most compelling argument. Just like the famous Brick Lane Mosque, previously a synagogue and before that a church, the old hospital is East End archaeology as much as architecture. This isn’t just East End past, but a crucial ingredient in what makes our present.
Useful links:
* Online petition at http://residents-first.co.uk/?p=760
Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Save-Mother-Levys/142259705878324
Tom Ridge’s detailed description of the architecture of the hospital at http://tinyurl.com/c3rsvgr