Most of the medieval leper or lazar houses which were established on the fringes of towns and cities in England were redundant by the middle of the 15th century; some became derelict while new uses were found for others. On the northern approach to the City of London was a lazar house which was one of several run as outposts of St Bartholomew's Hospital; it became known as Kingsland Lock and was then ‘applied to no other use than for the entertainment and cure of such as have the venereal malady’. A sundial which once stood in the garden of Kingsland Lock (now the site of a pub at Dalston Junction) was inscribed Post voluptatem misericordia (compassion after pleasure). A lock hospital in Southwark had a similar origin, whereas the much larger London Lock Hospital, which was purpose built facing Green Park near Hyde Park Corner on land granted on a 95-year lease from the Grosvenor estate, owed its foundation in 1746 to the voluntary hospital movement. When the lease expired the Georgian building of the London Lock was demolished in favour of fashionable new houses. A new Lock Hospital was built on a site between Harrow Road and the Regent's Canal in Westbourne Green, adjoining which a workhouse and infirmary (later Paddington General Hospital) were also built. None of these buildings remain. In addition to the new Lock Hospital, centrally located facilities were necessary. A house was acquired in Dean Street in Soho and replaced in 1912 by a neo-Georgian building, designed by Alfred Saxton Snell with the words Male Hospital in the portico. It survives as the only architectural reminder in London of a former era lasting several centuries, when Lock Hospitals provided for patients with venereal diseases.
Figure 1.
The story of the London Lock Hospital is told in detail in the wider context of the evolution of this specialist hospital system, in The London Lock—a Charitable Hospital for Venereal Disease 1746-1952, by Sir David Innes Williams (London: RSM Press, 1995)