What's the purpose of this website?
Cities need to be able to change and grow. Nevertheless, something is lost when we tear down a building that has had as much significance to a community as the South Street Hospital has had to London. 138 years of history is lost, to be precise.
My goal is to offer a unique way for people to explore the history of this hospital. Historians John R. Sullivan and Norman R. Ball have written an informative book that looks at the hospital from an institutional point of view. The London Health Science Centre's websites offer plenty of historic "scrapbooks" and a place for people to share their memories of the hospital. But until now, no one has taken a specific focus on the buildings themselves, and the use of the land. The physical space taken up by the hospital changed drastically over its long term of service. With the hospital being torn down and the land re-purposed, there's no better time than now to look at how the hospital physically developed, changed, and eventually came to an end.
When I embarked on this project, I was faced with two challenges. First, how do you concisely represent the geospatial history of a building over 140 years? And second, how can this history be narrated in a way that's accessible to everyone, not just medical or architectural historians? With a complex as large and as old as the South Street Hospital, building footprints offer an effective way to trace changes over time. After all, structures are a source of historical information just as much as books, paintings, or artifacts are. The map itself also provides a way for people to get this information in a way that doesn't rely on essays and articles. Finally, the interactivity of web maps gives everyone the opportunity to explore this information for themselves. I hope this website will help you rediscover the hospital you thought you knew!
How this website works
If this is your first time visiting this website, start by clicking on the first link. A series of interactive maps and short summaries shows how the hospital changed between 1875 and 2013. The physical area of study includes the four blocks bounded by Wellington Street, Hill Street, Colborne Street and the Thames River.
You'll notice a few things about the maps. They are fully interactive, which means you can pan and zoom just like you would on Google Maps. In the top right corner, you have the option to turn layers on and off.
There are two kinds of layers: structure layers and marker layers. Structures show what historical maps, aerial photos, photographs and sketches indicate the hospital to have looked like. The markers offer further information about the hospital and its history. Orange markers are associated with a specific location; blue ones are not. Click on them in alphabetical order to learn about how the hospital changed over time.
When you're done, you can explore the final map, or check out the "More Information" section to learn more about my methods, my sources, or the hospital itself.
If you've been to this website before, you can jump straight to the final map. This includes all the historical layers, which can be turned on or off to create whatever comparison you want to see.