AT AROUND 2:00 AM, the nurse came to fetch us and we headed upstairs to the Intensive Treatment Unit.  To this day, I don’t think I could retrace my steps, so labyrinthine were the hallways of Royal London Hospital.  Charlotte, Melanie, Michael, Ben the Chaplain and I followed the nurse down several corridors and then into what looked like a main section of the hospital.

I had been told several times that they were building a fancy new hospital behind this one which would be the largest hospital in London. It would be completed in 2012, and until then the current hospital was apparently receiving only the most basic maintenance – the majority of resources no doubt being poured into the new construction.  I had also been told the current hospital was several hundred years old, and it looked it.

While this was clearly an historic structure, it was also clearly a working building as well, and one which had grown organically over the years through good times and bad.  Consequently some of the updates (electricity, for one!) were done more systematically, and others seemed more haphazard.  Some rooms and spaces seemed squeezed in between others and there were steps up and down where they didn’t quite make sense.

In the lobby of the hospital hung a photo portrait of the Queen, decked out in royal splendor and a royal signature.  There was a shabby waiting area and what seemed like a perpetually stalled large revolving door.  There were half-hearted Christmas decorations strung around, and much to my surprise a large bronze church bell, hanging in a nook off the main lobby.  In the coming weeks and months, I would make it a practice to touch the bell as I walked by for good luck, and if there was nobody around, I’d rap it with my knuckles to hear the sound.

I subsequently learned the history of the bell, which is quite appealing.  The London Hospital bell was made in 1757 at the nearby Whitechapel Bell Foundry.  The hospital, founded 17 years earlier as the London Infirmary, moved to its present site in 1757. The owners of the bell foundry, Messrs Lester & Pack gifted the bell to the charity and were made governors of the hospital in recognition of their generous gift.

In its early days the bell was thought to have been rung morning and evening to signify when the hospital was open. During the Second World War the bell was suspended from a scaffold erected in the patients garden and struck with a hammer to act as an air raid warning. After the War the bell was hung outside the Works Department of the Hospital and in the late 1980s was brought back to the hospital and hung in the lobby.

Two main corridors branched out from either side of the main lobby and led to large stairways which spiraled up around central open square shafts.  There were grimy skylights above each stairway which during daylight hours admitted some illumination.

Most signs were in English and several south Asian languages which I didn’t recognize.  There was also a talking sign, which invited people to press the language of their choice to hear the message.  If nobody pressed any buttons, it would cycle through the options automatically.  I never heard the English message while we were there, so have no idea what it conveyed.

The Royal London Hospital complex is on Whitechapel Road, a mile or so east of the City of London in the heart of the notorious East End.  In addition to being the only London hospital with a heliport on the roof, this hospital was also the home in the 19th century of James Merrick, the Elephant Man. The old hospital was a large disparate group of buildings made of the distinctive yellowish-brown bricks with a main pedimented entrance with large pilasters and a clock.  It’s quite impressive really, or was a hundred years ago, but shares a quality of faded grandeur and degradation with much of the East End, where one can glimpse bits of grand old buildings or lacy wrought iron fences punctuating the dreary expanse of sooty modern buildings and garish neon-lit fried chicken shops which line Whitechapel Road and surrounding streets.

Like many neighborhoods in New York, this one changed its character with each wave of new immigrants.  Eastern European immigrants, French Huguenots, Jews and now Indians and Bengalis have changed the face of this area, while the hospital, stalwart in its classical architecture and London stock brick stands firm amidst the changing neighborhood.  It lies several blocks from the site of the eponymous and now-gone White Chapel, and is now two blocks from a huge Islamic Center with minaret and broadcast calls to prayer.

The tour buses don’t make it to this neighborhood and instead tend to stick to the familiar routes through central London and the City.  Which is too bad really because while unfamiliar and possible unpicturesque, this area of London offers a vibrancy and authenticity which doesn’t exist in the tourist centers.

Go to next chapter: Waiting