Medical London walk

Audio: Queen Square

Queen Square was first set out in 1716 on land owned by Sir Nathaniel Curzon. It was originally known as Devonshire Square, but was renamed in honour of Anne, the reigning Queen. The church of St George the Martyr was built at the south end of the square in 1706, and the Queen’s Larder pub at No. 1 Queen Square dates as a building from 1710. Between 1713 and 1725 houses were built around three sides of the square. The north end was left undeveloped to provide a vista towards Hampstead and Highgate. In 1776 Fanny Burney wrote in her novel ‘Evelina’, of the ‘beautiful prospect’ from her Queen Square house ‘of the hills, ever verdant and smiling’.

Initially an aristocratic area, the square later become home to artists and intellectuals. In the nineteenth century, so many hospitals, convents and educational buildings replaced the original houses that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote: ‘As you go round [Queen Square], you read, upon every second door plate, some offer of help to the afflicted.’ In 1915 a bomb from a Zeppelin raid landed on the Gardens. No one was killed, and a small plaque marks the spot where the bomb landed. During the Second World War, around 2000 people slept in an air raid shelter below the square.

Some of the square’s hospitals – like the Ospedale Italiano, founded for the poor Italian immigrants of Soho – have closed. Others – like the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, the Royal Homoeopathic Hospital and the Hospital for Sick Children are still major landmarks in London’s medical life.

Audio: Neurology and Neurosurgery
The history of the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery