Surprisingly central in a British city lurks this gorgeous, run-down labyrinthian complex. My original intent was to come here on the same day that I went to another nearby location, but given the size and time constraints, I decided to leave it for another day, and come back with Tamsin. Long time readers of my Shropshire blog will remember Tamsin from this school and this bunker, but anyone who's lived in Shropshire for long enough will also know her by her famous lineage, as her great-grandfather is historically recognised for introducing Hitler to interpretive dance.
But enough about dark topics. Nobody wants to read about interpretive dance! This is a humble eye infirmary!
The eye infirmary owes its existence to the rapid evolution of industry in the area 140 or so years ago, with an increase in factory-induced eye trauma, polution, rail travel and just the living conditions being abysmal in general. Sometimes people thought farting on their partners pillows to give them pink eye would be a fun prank?
Either way towards the end of the 19th Century, there was a rising need for an eye care facility. The local hospital offered some relief but it wasn't really able to cope in such a specialised area. Eventually two men rented out a house for the purpose of running an eye infirmary, which was hugely successful, treating some 2264 cases in the first year, with people literally lining up outside the house to be seen. Or to be able to see. But by 1884, it became clear that running a tiny clinic out of a rented house wasn't really ideal, and this led to the construction of this place in 1887, opening its doors to the public a year later.
The infirmary had three mens wards, three womens wards, and during the first world war there was a portion exclusively for war victims. Following the war funding increased and the operating theatre gained a complete renovation, and new heating. A nurses quarters was added in 1927, and an outpatients and A&E department was added in 1937. Throughout the 1930s it was treating roughly 142,000 patients a year.
There's some pretty cool graffiti here.
Slipping inside is pretty easy. As the patchwork boarding up of the windows indicates, access is constantly made by local trespassers and squatters, only to be fixed up by the powers-that-be in a futile effort to keep them out, only for them to do it again at another point in the building later on. As far as entrances were concerned, we were rather spoiled for choice.
Here's a small reception area, and if the exterior graffiti got your hopes up that we'd be seeing some actual street art in here, much like that Soviet Barracks that I blogged about recently, you'll be disappointed. Here in the UK all we get is penis and profanity.
Somehow amongst the wreckage this sign has survived unvandalised.
Here's the crumbling remains of the infirmary coffee shop. Presumably this would have been a waiting room, but now it feels like if I wait around too long something will fall on my head, or the floor will cave in. In fact we decided initially not to go to that doorway next to the coffee shop, because the floor didn't feel sturdy enough. Instead, our next course of action was an unlikely one given the buildings structural integrity, or lack of. We went upstairs.
These stairs are stone, and they spiral, which is highly unusual in a hospital, or so I assume. What do I know? I've never built one. From the outside this is visible as a conical tower, and part of the original 1887 design, albeit right on the edge of the later extensions.
We'll be checking out the more modern extensions first.
The spiral staircase led us to this peculiar room which certainly doesn't look very infirmaryish, but I've also read that in the later 20th Century one of the old operating theatres was converted into a chapel, so maybe this is it. Allegedly they even installed stained glass windows that were rescued from a derelict church, but I see no evidence of any stained glass windows here or in any other part of the entire building. I'm pretty sure we would have noticed. Tamsin would have been all over that like a rash.
However lets be honest, we're lucky to find any intact window, stained glass or otherwise. If they existed they've likely been smashed.
From here, the building continued...
Following World War 2, things were looking up for the infirmary. A second building was purchased to provide a training facility for the nurses, and in 1948, it was all absorbed into the NHS that we know and love, and complain about while failing to adequately fund.
The decay of this place makes it very visually appealing to me, even if most of the graffiti is stupid. It's in complete contrast to my last blog, which was a crumbly old mansion, needing some TLC but otherwise okay. I find that visually appealing too, but it was built to be. This is all remnants of what people left behind, and I think it's important to document it before its gone forever.
The later-constructed extension of the building is holding together reasonably well in spite of appearances. The floors were solid, at least. This hallway leads to various rooms where eye treatment would have taken place. Nowadays it's all rather unsanitary.
This is still in better condition than the toilets in some pubs and clubs.
I did try to get a few testimonies of people who had memories of this place in its glory days, but typically it consisted of things like "I loved working here as a nurse," and "I had a small chunk of metal removed from my eye." Ultimately, it's jusy an eye infirmary. It served a purpose and the stories are rather predictable. One thing that people seem to unaminously agree on is that it was a great place. Nobody has a bad thing to say about the service here.
Sadly it was societal progress that brought about the end for the eye infirmary. It was during the 1970s and 1980s that those dastardly Health and Safety overlords started to stick their fingers in everyones pies, and soon the scale of eye trauma was dropping dramatically as workplace conditions improved. This didn't cause too much of a downfall for the infirmary at first, but by the 1990s treatment had improved so much that people were spending less time actually in the hospital. Cataract patients in 1963 would be in hospital for two weeks with a bandage over their eye, but in the 1990s they were in and out within 90 minutes.
So the world was getting better, and the old eye infirmary was becoming somewhat unfit for purpose. It was a monument to archaic medical practices, but in terms of practicality the world was moving on. The decision was made to close it in 2004 and it finally closed its doors for good in 2007.
The closure was met with complaints, candle light vigils and a petition of some 48,000 names that made it all the way to Downing Street. However the place closed anyway, proving what we should already know, that the people in charge don't give a shit what any of us think, and peaceful protests serve no purpose other than for an individual to rake in those virtue points by posting selfies of themselves at events and saying that they were there. Centuries ago they had riots and revolutions that actively forced the powers-that-be to listen out of fear of being eaten, but we don't get that shit anymore because everyone wants someone else to do it so that they can stay in and watch Love Island.
Nowadays the most entertaining protests happen on Facebook and go like this:
"I voted Brexit, and we won."
"Yeah well I hate Brexit."
"Aha, you're triggered!"
"Yeah, well I use gender neutral pronouns."
"WHAT??? How dare you!!!! This irrelevant information that affects me in no way whatsoever is the worst thing since cot death!"
"Aha, now you're triggered!"
"No, you're triggered!"
"No, you're triggered!"
"I'm manspreading!"
"WHAAAT????"
And so on. I just gave both hornets nests a good jab with this one. If the corona virus doesn't get me, the internet will.
There's the remains of a mattress here.
Following the buildings closure, the NHS retained ownership but by 2010 it had already been looted to death by copper thieves and vandals. It was around this time that the first urban explorer articles started popping up, showing the place pretty trashed but still with signs and whatnot, and even the doctors names still on the doors. But it did decay pretty rapidly. By 2015 the NHS were desperately trying to find a potential buyer, claiming that it cost them £40,000 a year to pay for the buildings security.
I can't be the only person who fails to see where that money has been going. This place is about as secure as a drunk teenager riding a shopping trolley down a really steep hill into a barbed wire fence.
The trouble for potential buyers was, of course, that the place needs extensive redevelopment. The cost of saving it may be higher than the cost of buying it. Planning applications have hit numerous stumbling blocks. There was a plan to turn it into around a hundred flats but those plans fell through. Similarly Aldi and Poundland have had their eyes on it, and an office block was considered. But while potential buyers have circled like vultures and swooped off to devour something else instead, squatters have been putting the old building to use, and they've been about as subtle as the holocaust. In 2013 a bunch of them had to be rescued by firefighters after their efforts to keep warm backfired, and that wasn't to be the last time the fire crew had to come here.
This door references the Walking Dead with "Don't open, Dead inside," scrawled on it. Or "Don't dead open inside," for anyone who reads like a normal fucking person. Curiously the door was locked, with the windows boarded up, and that only intrigued me. We peered through what little gap remained in the circular windows and noticed that there was another door at the end of the room, so this wasn't the only way in, and so we made this our objective, continuing to scurry around this dilapidated rats maze.
We were able to find some stairs. Back to the ground floor!
The stairs brought us out in this massive waiting room with an old reception desk at the far end.
And luckily, I've managed to find an admittedly blurry photo of it from back when the place was still open, when it had rows and rows of seats.
Its pretty fuzzy. This must be how it looked to the eye patients.
Behind the reception were a number of small offices, still containing shelves that would have once held important documents.
This filing system is pretty cool. It's a fairly generic way of storing information in a compact space, where one can turn the handles to slide a shelf along, and open it up so that one can access the information on it. What's cool is that even in a place as trashed and smashed at this, these are still here, and they still work.
This area was pretty huge too, and I assumed at first that it might be a cafeteria or another waiting area.
However, a photo of this room from before the infirmary closed show this room split up into nunerous little cubicles.
This is pretty cool. Someone has painted Andrew Edritch onto the wall.
This room has a tree in it. Similarly, I was able to find old photos of this room too.
We came across another staircase. This one apparently led to the "Squint department."
Up until recently I always assumed that squint was a verb, for narrowing ones eyes to see something clearer, but apparently in medical terms a squint is when ones eyes point in different directions.
Squints are generally not fatal, but this graffiti would suggest otherwise.
The stairs brought us out onto this balcony overlooking the room we were just in, and then finally, it brought us to the zombie room, at last!
There on the right is the big door that had been barricaded. But for what purpose? There's nothing here! It's just more of the same! Very anticlimactic.
It was estimated in 2018 that the infirmary would cost some £2 million to save. The local council entered legal disputes with the NHS, giving them a notice period within which they had to get the place fixed up. The NHS, as you can see, did not get the work done, saying that this £2 million could be put to better use, such as doing what nobody seems to want to do, which is help fund the NHS and save lives. They also argued that the council were aware of the deterioration of the building as far back as 2011 and could have requested the work at a time when it would have been less costly.
Everything continues to plod along. The council refer to it as the cities biggest eyesore, which is ironic given that it's an eye infirmary. But it does give me an idea for a solution- just move it to Telford! Nobody will notice! It'll fit right in!
We're now entering into the older portion of the building, which is somewhat less stable than the rest, due partially to being older, but mostly to being set on fire. There was a clocktower on this portion, now off limits due to fire damage. An arson attack in January 2019 allegedly kept fire fighters occupied for about five hours. My sympathy is with the fire fighters, because it started at 11pm which means they didn't get to leave until 4am. Fighting accidental fires is one thing, but nobody wants to be cleaning up after imbeciles at that time of the day.
Curiously this fire happened around the same time local papers reported that the infirmary had been purchased by a mysterious private investor. Needless to say, we've seen this before. When a coincidence seems too convenient, it's usually not a coincidence.
A dilapidated eye infirmary isn't really the place one expects to find an abandoned bra...
Getting upstairs in this portion of the building was going to be a challenge.
As you can see, we managed it but it was quite the scramble!
Once up here we were pretty restricted to what we could do. This entire hallway has collapsed, putting a chunk of the upper floor completely off limits.
What we have got is some examples of Victoria architecture though. The building is noticeably nicer and more refined, albeit trashed. It could easily be mistaken for a manor or something.
This part still has wallpaper which is quite nice.
It feels more child-focused than the rest. Perhaps this was the childrens ward.
Here's a book called The Uploaded, which I looked up and will probably have to purchase at some point because the premise is intriguing. It seems to be set in some future dystopia where people started uploading the minds of the dead into computers so that they could live forever, turning cyber-space into a sort of afterlife. The long-term repurcussions being that in the future, the dead vastly outnumber the living, get to watch us through our technology, judge us, and inevitably control us. It sounds very intriguing and weird.
Although whether the book is any good seems debatable. You don't see The Shining or the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy cast away and abandoned on the floor of dilapidated eye infirmaries. Perhaps the excellent premise is executed so horribly that someone dropped it here out of disappointment.
While the buildings main cellar was unreachable, there was a smaller one down this church-like stone spiral staircase. But it only really led to a tiny room, disappointing given the size of the place.
And sadly, that's all we've got. The Eye Infirmary seems doomed. If it doesn't get demolished, it will demolish itself. Perhaps a passer-by will sneeze and the whole thing will just collapse. Or maybe another mysterious arson attack will help prepare the site for a property developer. Maybe The Sun newspaper will announce that the corona virus is now spreading via photon and infecting people through the optic nerve, sparking an eye infirmary revamp frenzy. It sounds ridiculous, but it is the Sun we're talking about. The only thing stopping them from running that story is that nobody there knows what a photon is.
It's too early to say. In any case, things are happening very slowly and it continues to rot.
If anyone does find themselves here and fancies a nose, take another human for safety, or at the very least let someone know that you're going there.
My next blog will be a small one, as Tamsin and I check out a mysterious tunnel, and the one after that will be a pretty cool abandoned school building. Share the blog in the meantime, and follow it on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
Thanks for reading!
'Its pretty fuzzy. This must be how it looked to the eye patients.'
ReplyDeletePMSL......you are a wicked man Chris!!!
Another good tour, great work Chris.
ReplyDelete