The end of Bourne Hospital
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THE DEATH KNELL finally sounded for Bourne Hospital in April 2003 when the site was sold for redevelopment. The closure of this primary care facility, the last in the immediate area, was a monument to the failure of the National Health Service to deliver the promises that were made back in 1948, that each of us would be cared for from the cradle to the gave, and an indication that things may well get much worse in the coming years.
The sign that once stood outside the hospital complex now lay on its side, uprooted as an indication that medical help was no longer available here. Instead, another sign had gone up announcing the fate of the four-acre site which was to become a residential estate, despite the pleas from this town that the hospital was a much needed facility and without it, residents would need to travel long distances to Stamford and Peterborough for primary health care, and that also meant accidents and emergencies.
The hospital was built with money from our local rates and taxes and yet the asset would realise a small fortune for the developers while the people of Bourne would not see a penny of it. By some bureaucratic sleight of hand, this facility was no longer owned by the people who paid for it and it would be lost for all time, its worth snapped up by big business, and those of us who continued to pay our taxes, as they did in times past, could not understand how this had been allowed to happen.
It was obvious that the hospital would no longer meet present day medical requirements but there was evidence that standards had been allowed to decline in the years prior to the final closure and only a new hospital would now be a suitable alternative to the present facility. But with the sale of the land, that opportunity had also been lost and so the people of Bourne had to reconcile themselves to the prospect of no hospital in the future, surely a retrograde step for a town that once had three.
On Monday 7th April 2003, I went to take a final look at the hospital complex which now awaited the bulldozers to clear the site. Very soon, most probably before the year's end, the first of the seventy new houses would have been built and another phase of Bourne's history will have disappeared under bricks and mortar. I wondered if prospective buyers would be told that their new home town had no hospital.
Here is a glimpse of Bourne Hospital as it was on that day, the place where thousands were once treated and cared for, but which was now in a shamefully neglected state, a much-needed community facility that was allowed to wither and die for the sake of financial expediency.
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. . . and finally, the tuberculosis pavilion, built to treat victims of the white scourge, as this disease was known in the early years of the 20th century. When it was opened by the Earl of Ancaster in 1925, it was described as one of the finest buildings of its kind in the country. This is what it looks like today.
