by Roger Luckhurst, literary scholar
Christmas Day, three years before the coronavirus could count to 19. My dad, with a nasty bout of pneumonia, had stabilised and been moved out of the ICU, but transfers between wards were achingly slow. He was slumped uncomfortably in a chair, and the porters, nurses and doctor all eyed the empty gurney in the corridor outside: couldn’t we move him there? In the beat before the doctor nixed the idea, we all saw the tabloid headlines bloom: BIDDY IN HOSPITAL CORRIDOR WAITING HORROR.
When did the corridor become the worst place to be in a hospital? I remember long waits in draughty corridors, among a random assortment of chairs, yellowing posters and a maltreated pot-plant or two, straining for the consultant’s muffled call. Now, patients are pooled in light-filled atria, among the wafted scents of sweet pastries and flat whites, watching screens. Hospital design has turned profoundly anti- corridic. Yet once the corridor was the standard of institutional modernity and hygiene.
It was Florence Nightingale’s Notes on Hospitals (1859), and her tireless badgering of conservative medical authorities, that prompted a design revolution in hospitals.[1] Pavilion wards, well-ventilated, separated and with entry controlled were to be accessed from a corridor spine that abolished through traffic on wards yet kept every part of the building connected. This was the origin of the long ‘link’ corridor. In the model pavilion hospital that opened opposite the Palace of Westminster in 1871, the whole complex was serviced by a 900 feet-long corridor.
These corridors grew to even greater lengths in asylums, where taxonomies of mental illness were mapped out along wards organised around central corridors, an influential idea first pursued by the American ‘mad-doctor’ Thomas Kirkbride. These monster asylums grew into complexes miles in length; a friend of mine who worked in the last years of Colney Hatch Asylum remembered the staff used bicycles to save time in the longest link corridors.
In 1967, medic Mayer Spivack published a study called ‘Sensory Distortion in Tunnels and Corridors’, suggesting that corridors that reached over a mile might actively induce mental illness rather than rationalise its treatment [2]. Monster hospitals fell out of favour, denounced as ‘total institutions’, or what were later termed ‘sick buildings’. Anti-psychiatry proved to be an anti-corridic movement. This fed into hospital design, too, with the first designed around the open atrium appearing in America in the early 1970s.
Every architectural form of the public institution embeds a history of the ideals and failures of waves of successive reform. Contemplate the fate of the hospital corridor as you sip a Fairtrade, fresh-brewed coffee amongst the palms and piped music of a bright glass atrium.
References
- F. Nightingale, Notes on Hospitals, 3rd edn (London: Longmans, 1863).
- M. Spivack, ‘Sensory Distortion in Tunnels and Corridors’, Hospital and Community Psychiatry, 18:1 (1967), 12-18.