The wonderful staircase of St Bartholomew’s hospital

A hospital staircase might not be the first place that comes into your head when you think about great works of art, least of all in a National Health Service hospital where famously all money goes into patient care rather than particularly beautified buildings and landscapes.

What happens though when the hospital is celebrating its 900th birthday? It has to be St Bartholomews Hospital or to all that know and love it, St Barts. Said to be the oldest hospital in the western world and one I myself checked myself into after Mind The Gap – Someone pushed me under a London Underground Train!

The hospital features in my Sherlock Walk, Great Crimes and Punishments, Historic Pub Tour and a few others including most fittingly London’s Millennia of Progress: A Medical History of Bodysnatchers to Vaccines! tour.

Like it’s beautiful and ancient neighbour St Bartholomew the Great Church, the hospital is said to have been founded by Rahere after he was at deaths door and having made a promise to the heavenly Saint Bartholomew that if he might recover and make it back to London then he would create a church for the spiritual health of the people and a hospital for its physical health. 900 years on, the hospital is better than ever and 2 of his 4 churches built around and about seem to be going strong too.

Over 900 years the hospital has naturally acquired a few wonderful features and treasures and none can be more eye catching that this wonderfully painted stairway.

It just so happened that the painter William Hogarth was born barely five minutes walk away in the aptly named St Bartholomew Close and when in 1733 he heard that the hospital was looking to commission the Venetian artist Jocopo Amigoni to paint a mural on the staircase for their showcased new Northwing of the hospital, he offered his services to the hospital entirely for free.

The work is entitled ‘Jesus at the Pool of Bethesda’ and it is around 36 feet or 12 metres across and so large it is almost impossible to take in the magnificence of its being but it certainly makes an impact.

A special charitable trust has been set up to safeguard the heritage of the staircase, great hall and other aspects of this grand old but still incredibly functioning hospital which hopefully see it enjoying further access to the public because for many years it has been largely closed except for special events.