On the station we noticed how many bikes were chained up, with their owners having taken the train in to work. There is a ‘congestion tax’ which you are charged like a toll if you drive your car past a certain perimeter around the city. Stefan told us of how one day the lock on his bike could not be opened and the locksmith was going to charge more than the bike was worth to cut it free. Instead he borrowed a cutting device from the college where he worked and cut the bike free himself. No-one challenged him as he carried the large and obvious machinery onto the station and then proceeded to make plenty of noise cutting the metal.
We tried again for the Herb Garret and Operating Theatre Museum today, and arrived just as it opened. The Church of St Thomas Apostle was the parish church of St Thomas’s Hospital from 1136 to 1862. It was rebuilt in 1703 and the roof space was used as the hospital’s herb garret and as an operating theatre from 1822. It was forgotten about in further renovations and was only rediscovered in 1956. To reach it we wound up the spiral staircase of a gate house, and entered a tiny garret room that seemed to have been missed by time. Baskets of herbs, with their various uses detailed, were on all the benches, with display cases showing some of the tools of trade for surgeons in past eras.
It was important to understand that the profession of physician was one learned in religious universities and practised in monastic hospitals, with doctors obeying the Pope’s ruling against shedding blood. Surgery, of necessity therefore, was a secular activity and was dominated by barbers who specialised in blood letting, dentistry and minor operations. There were many more surgeons than physicians, with many learning their skills by accompanying armies and attending to soldiers’ wounds. Opium and alcohol were known for their use in deadening pain. In the 18th Century surgeons were apprenticed for seven years to learn their trade. A lack of ready bodies to work on led to body snatching and other unsavoury practices, such as killing poor people or digging up fresh graves. Eventually the Anatomy Act allowed surgeons to use unclaimed bodies from the work houses.Another difference to today was in the idea of a hospital. They were more like alms houses, where poor people were given a bed until they were on their feet again and could fend for themselves. They would be given money to start up with and any necessary prostheses to help them. People wishing to be taken in at St Thomas’s Hospital would line up on Mondays and a committee would decide on whom to take. People were expected to pay for services if they could, with ‘foul’ patients being charged more than the clean. It went without saying that people with smallpox, infectious diseases, head scold, pregnant women, children, those suffering with terminal illnesses and the undeserving such as prostitutes, would not be admitted. It was in reaction to these restrictions that Sir Thomas Guy started the Guys Hospital, which served the very poor, the ‘foul’ and the very ill.
The operating theatre, in use from 1821 to 1862, was exactly that, with tiers of stands for apprentices and sightseers to have a good view of what was happening on the operating table. At first, operations had been performed in the wards, but the noise of patients having amputations and other invasive surgery without anaesthetics was disturbing to others, particularly visitors. The theatre was created by subdividing the herb garret, and was directly above the church. To avoid blood seeping through into the church, a false floor was built with a thick layer of sawdust under it to absorb blood. Boxes of sawdust were used under the table to catch blood, with blood letting prior to operations being a good way of ensuring not too much mess, as well as less struggling by the patients. Assistant surgeons were there to hold the patient down and still. One surgeon could amputate a limb and sew a skin flap over the wound in 28 seconds. It was reckoned that three to five minutes was as much as anyone could bear, and so a speedy surgeon was much sought after.
This operating theatre saw the introduction of anaesthesia, but not of antiseptic practices as discovered by Lister and accepted universally in the 1880s.The surgeon’s tools were scary, large and intrusive, with specialised knives and saws for amputations, and horrible items to be inserted into the urethra to remove or crunch up bladder stones.
The midwifery implements would make anyone long for an easy and unassisted birth, although it was regular for women to be in labour for up to a week and by then maybe you just wouldn’t be up to protesting about the implements to be used on you. It was not until quite late that cutting into the wall of the abdomen became safer and Caesarean sections became more common.
An array of anatomical specimens lay in jars and some hungry leeches moved listlessly around their bowl. A recipe for snail water to cure venereal disease called for “six gallons of cleansed and bruised garden snails, three gallons of earth worms and copious amounts of eight different herbs and spices. Digest them together for twenty-four hours and then draw off the juices.” I wonder if the mixture worked. What a delight this place was, and all in this tiny little original space.Stefan draped his jumper over the back of his chair when we paused for a coffee to study the maps for our next adventure, and not noticing it, we set off again without it. We were on our way to High Street, Kensington, where we passed many very up-market stores and saw girls and boys in designer leisure wear out and about, wanting to be seen. We also saw every other sort of person, since London is nothing if not cosmopolitan. A queue near the station, which was about a hundred people long, was waiting for the London version of our York Dungeons experience to let them in, while one of the actors, taking a break, hid the side of her face that had been made up to make her look like some kind of face peeling victim, as she smoked a cigarette.
Many of the buildings in the area of the roof garden, which was our next bit of ‘Secret London’, were sleek and included art nouveau details. We should have noticed the greenery from the street, but we hadn’t, so when we arrived at the sixth floor, we were amazed to find one and a half acres of mature gardens, with trees, ponds and pink flamingos. The first section of the garden was woodland, with large trees growing in 18 inches of soil. A gardener told us that the roots are encouraged to go sideways, rather than down, and that everything is planted at a very early stage to allow for it to grow in shallow soil. Trevor Bowen, the vice president of John Barker and Co, employed Ralph Hancock as his landscape architect and after two years, his dream became a reality and opened to the public in 1938. The shilling entry fees went to local charities. Richard Branson now owns the building and runs it as an events space and nightclub.
We continued around the garden with one glorious vista opening up after another, and the woodland changing into a Tudor garden with a colonnade. From there we entered the Spanish garden, which made use of beautiful tiles and plants with dramatic foliage.
Above: The rooftop garden would not be noticed by the average passer-by in the street six floors below.It was when we were back at ground level that Stefan realised that he had left his jumper behind, so we hot footed it back to the café. Unfortunately it was a lunchtime only kind of place and it was all locked up. The kind man in the next shop tried the back door to see if the cleaner had arrived but we had to give up, with Stefan philosophically saying that he was divesting himself of most of his goods anyway and maybe the jumper had simply divested itself.
Back home and conscious that this was our last night together, we finished off the photos and chatted for ages about Stefan’s next moves. We hoped that our paths would cross again, since we felt that we had really come to know him and to see him as a friend, as well as one of the family.
Some of London's stations have been equipped with a transparent wall close to the edge of the platform. The doors in the wall line up with the doors on the train and don't open until the train has stopped. This installation is to stop people being pushed up close to the train or even onto the tracks during the heaviest peak periods, when the underground system can't cope with the numbers of commuters.
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