The Royal London Hospital & Joseph Merrick

Why is it significant?

Across Whitechapel Road stretches the long Georgian front of the old London Hospital, and behind it rise the blue glass towers of the new Royal London, with a helicopter landing pad on the roof. Wait a moment and you may see the red helicopter of London's Air Ambulance dropping out of the sky.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Across Whitechapel Road stretches the long Georgian front of the old London Hospital, and behind it rise the blue glass towers of the new Royal London, with a helicopter landing pad on the roof. Wait a moment and you may see the red helicopter of London's Air Ambulance dropping out of the sky.

The hospital was founded in 1740 as the London Infirmary, for the sailors, weavers and labourers of the East End, and it moved into this building in 1757. For two and a half centuries it was the hospital of the East End. Edith Cavell, the nurse later executed in the First World War for helping Allied soldiers escape occupied Belgium, trained here. So did Thomas Barnardo, who came to study medicine and stayed to found his homes for destitute children. It only became the Royal London in 1990.

In 1884, in a shop just across the road, a showman exhibited a young man with a severely deformed body as the Elephant Man. His name was Joseph Merrick. A surgeon from the hospital, Frederick Treves, went to see him. Two years later, after an appeal in The Times, Merrick was given rooms at the back of the hospital, and there he lived until his death in 1890, at just 27. He read, he wrote poems, he built a model of a cathedral out of card, and he received visitors, among them the Princess of Wales. His skeleton is still kept by the medical school, for research, not display.

The old building you are looking at has now been converted into the borough's town hall, so the corridors where Merrick, Cavell and Barnardo once walked are full of council meetings and wedding parties. Hospitals, synagogues, chapels and breweries, nothing in this part of London stays one thing for long.

You began at a pump on the edge of the City, and you have followed Huguenots, Jews, Irish and Bangladeshis through the same few streets, each wave stepping into the shoes of the last. If you still have energy, the great mural of the Battle of Cable Street, painted on the side of St George's Town Hall, is about fifteen minutes' walk to the south. If not, Whitechapel station is right here, with the purple trains of the Elizabeth line, opened in 2022, ready to carry you anywhere in London.