The site in Upper Sunbury Road, which has been occupied by Hampton Care Home since 2009, has a rich and illustrious history. Before it became the comfortable, modern residential care home of today, this area housed a forgotten relic of the 20th century, St Mary’s Cottage Hospital.
It all began in 1912 with the donation of funds for a cottage hospital by local private philanthropist Mr T. Forster Knowles. A one-acre plot of land was bought for £550, and, by June 1913, Hampton Cottage Hospital had opened with 20 beds at a cost of £4,000 (equivalent to £473,000 today). Unsurprisingly, it was requisitioned by the military during the First World War, and an annex was built, adding another 16 beds. By the end of the war, the hospital – now renamed St Mary’s Cottage Hospital – had become a voluntary facility with patients treated by their GPs. More land was acquired and extensions added during the 1920s, including a popular staff tennis court! At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, the hospital joined the Emergency Medical Service. This state-run network of free hospital services is seen as a forerunner to the National Health Service (NHS).
Sure enough, in 1948, St Mary’s was absorbed by the newly founded NHS and by the end of the 1950s the hospital had 16 GPs and six visiting consultants. But the hospital was neither comfortable nor well equipped – there was no X-ray department or changing facilities, and patients waited in the corridors for consultations. Nothing was done about this, however, and by 1979 a shortage of funds was threatening the hospital with closure. It remained open, thanks to some dramatic eleventh-hour support from doctors, local counsellors, trade union members and local residents who had rallied round to save their hospital.
Costs were still rising though. By 1985 the hospital’s yearly running expenses were about £276,400 while the average cost of in-patient care was £46.38 per day.
By 1993, it was clear that the hospital was too big to be called a ‘cottage hospital’ and so the word was dropped from the title. At this time, it had 12 GP beds plus six beds earmarked for elderly people. A year later, under the recently formed marketplace system, St Mary’s joined the Kingston and District Community NHS Trust with 18 GP beds for care of the elderly only.
In 1999 St Mary’s closed as a hospital but its buildings were used as a residential care home – St Mary’s Lodge – until this, too, closed its doors in 2004. The buildings were finally demolished two years later.
In 2009, Hampton Care Home was erected on the site like a phoenix rising from the ashes. Hampton, a care home that specialises in promoting health for the elderly, still encompasses the philosophy of the original hospital and the good intentions of all those who planned, raised funds for, built and worked so hard in the old ‘lost’ hospital.
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