The old Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital in Euston Road

Façade of the old Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital in Euston Road. I used to walk past it every day on my way to work. Although the Euston Road is busy, this little corner always seems quiet.

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson was the first woman in Britain to qualify as a doctor. A militant feminist, she was active in all sorts of women-only initiatives including founding the Ladies Residential Dwelling in Bloomsbury – a sort of collective of professional women, socialist women and suffragettes. In 1866 Elizabeth Garrett Anderson founded a dispensary, and in 1872 this became the New Hospital for Women where women patients were treated exclusively by women.

The building on Euston Road dates from 1889 and incorporates a foundation stone laid by the then Princess of Wales. In the 1970s there was a proposal to close the hospital and this provoked a furious campaign that continued until 1979 when Margaret Thatcher confirmed it would stay open and granted investment funds of two and a half million pounds. The campaign is important in historical terms in that it represented an attempt to maintain the status quo in public services against powerful pressures (not least inflation) that insisted on cutbacks.

As we know, Margaret Thatcher’s decision to save the hospital was out of character, and her main instinct was “modernize” even if it meant painful cutbacks. This is the option France is currently facing (and will decide in the election this weekend which course to take). It can rationalize its society and enter the (not always pleasant) modern world or it can preserve its institutions and drift into a comfortable decline.

Comfortable decline remains comfortable until the inevitable moment when you fall off the edge of a cliff.

Margaret Thatcher’s intervention didn’t save the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital in the long term. The Euston Road building closed in 2002 and the hospital “merged” with UCH’s Obstetric Hospital. The massive new UCH on the corner of Euston Road and Tottenham Court Road will have an “EGA Wing” which will open in 2008 to treat women only.

Institutions are almost always bound up with the buildings they occupy (which influence them in a whole range of ways - physical organisation, mental image, public access etc), and probably this is the end of the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital, whatever it says on the government press release.