London: a women’s history miscellany

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Royal Waterloo Hospital for Children and Women

We’ve had three visits to London over the last couple of years. As you know, I always keep my eyes open for evidence of women and their history so I thought I would gather together relevant images from all three trips. A large number have medical connections, starting with the former Royal Waterloo Hospital for Children and Women building (above) which dates from 1903-05 and is now student accommodation.

In a particularly dark episode in the 1960s and 70s its psychiatric ward, run by Dr William Sargant, treated 500 patients, mostly young women, who were subjected to experimental and often dangerous treatments:

They included the ‘Narcosis’ or sleep room where patients suffering depression could be effectively put into a coma for up to 3 months at a time. This was done without the full knowledge and consent of the patients and tragically led to the death of some and life changing mental effects on others.

Sargant retired in 1973 taking all his medical records with him. This is the kind of history which stops me in my tracks – such horrific things were happening here in my lifetime.

Another former hospital is the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital for Women on Euston Road (shown below). Elizabeth was the first woman to train as a doctor in the UK and founded the New Hospital for Women in 1872. She raised the funds for this building which opened in 1890 and functioned as a hospital into the early 21st century. It now belongs to a Trade Union, UNISON, though it still includes an exhibition gallery about Elizabeth. The opening hours were quite restricted and unfortunately I was never nearby at an appropriate time to visit. Sadly, on checking the website for this post, I see that it is now closed to visitors until further notice – a missed opportunity. Elizabeth’s name lives on in a wing of University College Hospital.

Information panel
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital

The sculpture below is Unity by Wendy Taylor CBE (2010):

The rings represent a symbol of collective strength and solidarity, which links UNISON with the work of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and all pioneering women everywhere.

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital
Unity by Wendy Taylor

Staying with the medical theme, the first statue below – Florence Nightingale – will need no introduction. She stands on Waterloo Place. The other, in Tavistock Square, is Louisa Brandreth Aldrich-Blake (1865-1925). In the first of many links and overlaps as this post meanders on, she was Surgeon to the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital (1895-1925). She was also Consulting Surgeon at the Royal Free Hospital (1919-1925) and Dean of the London (Royal Free Hospital) School of Medicine for Women (1914-1925). She died of cancer, aged just 60. I had never heard of Louisa and am pleased to add her to my roll-call of amazing women.

Florence Nightingale on Waterloo Place
Louisa Brandreth Aldrich-Blake in Tavistock Square

A couple of plaques now, one near Bloomsbury Square which commemorates the foundation of the Association of Women Pharmacists in 1905, and the other on the wall of the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine commemorating Winifred Cullis (1875 -1956), the first woman to hold a professorial chair at a medical school and only the second woman in the UK to be appointed to a chair at a British university-level institution.

Inaugural meeting of Association of Women Pharmacists 1905
Winifred Cullis, Physiologist

Moving from medicine to the suffrage movement, below are a plaque to the Pankhursts which I spotted on Russell Square, the statue in Parliament Square of Millicent Fawcett, leading suffragist and sister to Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (I told you there were lots of links), and a plaque to Sarah Parker Redmond. The latter could just as easily have been included in the medical section, because as well as an abolitionist and suffragist she was also an obstetrician.

Emmeline, Christabel and Sylvia Pankhurst were here.
Sarah Parker Redmond 1826-1894
Millicent Fawcett by Gillian Wearing (2018)

From women struggling to get the vote to women who gained political power by an accident of birth – Queen Victoria on the Strand and Mary Queen of Scots sitting above a branch of Pret on Fleet Street. You can guess which class of women I admire more!

Queen Victoria on the Strand
Mary Queen of Scots above Pret on Fleet Street

War can be regarded as a failure of politics – below are references to the First and Second World Wars. Again there is overlap with the medical section because the statue is Edith Cavell, a British nurse celebrated for treating wounded soldiers from both sides without discrimination and for helping about 200 Allied soldiers escape from German-occupied Belgium. Cavell was arrested, court-martialled under German military law, and sentenced to death. She was executed at dawn on October 12th, 1915.

The Monument to the Women of World War II was unveiled in Whitehall in 2005 and features 17 different uniforms and helmets sculpted as if hanging on pegs. These represent the hundreds of vital jobs undertaken by over 7 million women during the war, a contribution which is often overlooked.

Edith Cavell memorial, St Martin’s Place (George Frampton, 1920)
Monument by John W Mills (2005)

I passed this church at 17:30 on a November afternoon, so forgive its lack of clarity. St Mary le Strand is the Church of the Women’s Royal Naval Service.

Church of the Women’s Royal Naval Service
Church of the Women’s Royal Naval Service

Literature next! Back to Tavistock Square where Virginia Woolf lived from 1924 to 1939 and wrote many of her greatest novels, including To the Lighthouse. Woburn Walk, a Georgian lane much used by film makers, was home to Dorothy Richardson (1873-1957) the author of Pilgrimage, a sequence of 13 novels which emphasised the nature of female experiences. And I can’t resist including the offices of DC Thomson in Fleet Street with the names of its brands emblazoned across it, including The People’s Friend, a women’s magazine beloved by many including my late mother.

Virginia Woolf statue in Tavistock Square
Woburn Walk
Fleet Street offices of DC Thomson

Ever since reading about it on A bit about Britain I have wanted to visit Cross Bones on Redcross Way in Southwark. In November 2022 we did so. I’ll briefly describe its origins here, but I commend to you Mike’s article, linked above, for an in depth and thought provoking history.

Cross Bones is thought to have been established in the 17th century as a single women’s cemetery. For single women, read prostitutes, also known as Winchester Geese because they were licensed by the Bishop of Winchester to work within the Liberty of the Clink, an area outside the jurisdiction of the City of London where brothels and other activities not permitted within the city could be found. By 1769, Cross Bones had become a paupers cemetery and remained so until its closure in 1853, by which time as many as 15,000 people are believed to have been buried there. Today it is a memorial garden run by Bankside Open Spaces Trust. As well as honouring the sex workers of the past there are other commemorations, for example a section with Japanese Mizuko jizo statues in honour of babies lost to miscarriage or still birth. I found the whole garden very moving.

Street art on the way to Cross Bones
Cross Bones donation box
General view
Cross Bones memorial ribbons
Mizuko jizo statues
I was born a Goose of Southwark
Carrion Crow rhyme
Madonna with chillies
La Catrina, donated by the Mexican Ambassador in 2021

And now for something completely different – a wine bar, El Vino on Fleet Street. At one time women could not be served, or even stand, in the main bar but were confined to table service in a back room. After the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 was passed there were several  unsuccessful legal attempts to overturn this policy but it was not until Gill and Coote v El Vino Co Ltd went to the Court of Appeal in 1982 that the ban was overturned. Some of the defence arguments are really quite hilarious in their sexism, such as that it might be be embarrassing for staff to “procure wine from floor level through the legs of a lady who happens to be standing by the wine racks”.  Ever heard of “Excuse me”?

El Vino
El Vino window sign

I’ll end with some links back to previous posts. The bust in the gallery below is Elizabeth Pepys in St Olave’s Church, wife of diarist Samuel and last written about in October 2023 (In the footsteps of Pepys). I only noticed the small metal objects embedded in the pavement on Marchmont Street in Bloomsbury on our most recent visit in July this year. I had no idea what they were, but Googling the name on one of them, Meriah Duchesne, I discovered that they were linked, indeed led the way, to the Foundling Museum which we had visited in November 2022. Mothers would leave small tokens with their babies as identification should they be in a position to reclaim them from the Foundling Hospital in later years. The artist is John Aldus (2010). So poignant.

Meriah Duchesne
Marchmont Street Tokens
Marchmont Street Tokens
Elizabeth Pepys memorial

Finally, three women already met from the lightbox installation St Marylebone’s Changing Faces which I visited in May 2023. Bringing us almost back full circle, one of them is Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson
Evelyn Dove
Octavia Hill

I find it really helpful to have a theme in mind on my walks around cities – it makes me much more observant. Some of the sights above were sought out deliberately, but a great deal of serendipity was involved, and many were snapped and forgotten about till I came to write this post. I’ve learned a lot by looking them up. I hope you have too.

England, UK ,

69 Comments »

  1. How wonderful, touring many familiar places but with such a fresh feminine lens. I feel as if I know nothing at all, oblivious to half or more of London’s citizens, the more vital half.

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  3. Hi Anabel – well you’ve certainly ‘uncovered’ many interesting women for us – some known, some new ones – and the only two I can think of that you’ve not included, I’m sure for lack of time, as opposed to forgetting about … Mary Seacole, outside St Thomas’, and Edith Cavell off Trafalgar Square. Those tokens embedded into the pavement are very poignant … The Foundling Hospital has an essential part of our lives today. Great post – and yes Mike does write some extraordinary articles – cheers Hilary

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  6. Many of the old institutions had pretty grim methods, even in the 1960s and 1970s as I worked in some of them as an apprentice in Glasgow. Like the Redcross Way murals/sculptures. ( been offline last 3 weeks due to fault on outside pole.) Bob. BSS.

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  10. Fascinating! As for the psychiatric unit functioning in our lifetimes (I’m about your age, I think), it reminds we why we can’t be satisfied to simply say, “If it’s science, it’s right.” There have always been scientific experiments carried out on humans, often without their permission. Science always has to be tempered with morals and mercy, in my opinion. And as for women, it is encouraging to see how far we’ve come, but we still have a long way to go. Great post!

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  18. Fascinating and totally absorbing to read and see all that you discovered on your visits. I certainly need to be more observant when I visit places! My grandmother gave me The Girls’ Book of Heroines in the 1950’s which still resonates with me and some of your ladies mentioned above feature in the book. I wonder who would feature in a modern book of heroines?! Thank you for such a great post.

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  19. I really enjoyed the theme of this blog post and the idea of engaging in a particular focus of one’s wanderings around a city. It is always interesting to learn from history and I agree it can be a shock to the system to realize that some of these historic failings by society were happening within our lifetimes. It really sharpens the mind on what things are happening right now that we need to shine a light on and get activated about. Women’s rights are, for instance, very much back on the ballot in the imminent US election and I am extremely anxious about the outcome.

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  21. What an incredibly informative post Anabel. I had heard of the medical women and knew of that monument to the women of the Second World War but never seen it. But what blew me apart was the fact that women were segregated until 1982 in bars? That blows my mind. They got to vote in 1918 but couldn’t walk into one section of a pub…

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  22. A thoroughly informative post! Quite a lot I knew, as a Londoner, but you’ve managed to show me several new things despite my decades living here! I’ve never yet managed to get inside Cross Bones (it was locked on both my visits to date) and I didn’t know there were Jizo statues there. They fascinated me when in Japan, especially Nikko, so I must make a point of visiting these. And somehow I’ve never spotted the metal objects on Marchmont Street although I must have walked it much more recently than 2010!

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  23. A fascinating read, much enjoyed. Will be adding Crossbones to the list for my next London trip.

    The history of the Waterloo hospital is chilling and the fact that the doctor in question took his notes even more so.

    Did you spot any of the history of the maternity hospital around Cathedral quarter when you were here in Belfast? I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole a bit with it all, I have thought of you as I’ve been digging!

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  25. This is a lovely thematic tour. I totally agree with you that having a theme in mind would make more observant. Lots of London details I have never noticed before even though I have been to the city many times…(Suzanne)

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  26. What an incredible post – so many I hadn’t heard of. An excellent post – now wondering what women I can tell you about when you are in BOA! I might have to go and buy a book from one of my neighbours before you get here as they have an amazing tale about one.

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  28. As always, a very interesting post. I love the mural with the cats and the section on Cross Bones – what a moving and poignant place. I’ve never heard of it before so I’m off to read Mike’s post about it now 🙂

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