Parkview

The novitiate building at the Lewisham Hospital complex on West Street, Lewisham, was not a ward. It was the place where women entered the Little Company of Mary and began their formation as sisters and nurses. Its cellular interior layout was built for individual contemplation and communal religious life, a different architecture from the surrounding hospital wings with their operating theatres, verandahs, and ward corridors. The complex that grew around it was built in stages across nearly four decades. The first hospital wing opened on 9 June 1889, when Cardinal Patrick Francis Moran opened a building designed to serve women and children. The 1900 general hospital wing, designed by H.E. Wardell of Wardell and Denning and built by W.J. Crothers of Lewisham, introduced machine-pressed brick with white stone dressings, tiled roofs, half-timbered gable work, and extensive verandahs overlooking Petersham Park. An operating theatre in that wing featured a tiled floor, glass roof, and marble and nickel furnishings. The 1908 convent followed, two storeys with basement and attics, built of brick on stone foundations. The Chapel of the Maternal Heart of Mary was completed in 1927 in Byzantine Revival style, its high vaulted ceiling designed to carry the sound of the Moller pipe organ installed the following year. By 1948 the hospital was recording 88,399 out-patient attendances in a single year. The Little Company of Mary, known as the Blue Nuns for their blue veils, vacated the site in 1986 after nearly a century of continuous operation. The hospital formally closed around 1988. This room, photographed in 2019, shows a floor under settled dust, walls where paint has pulled away from the surface, and light moving through a space that has been still for a long time. The building remains standing on a site still in use, but this interior has been left to accumulate the quiet of the years since the last sisters walked through it.