Abstract

Post Voluptatem Misericordia: The Rise and Fall of the London Lock Hospitals JAMES BETTLEY N THE HARROW ROAD, Paddington, beside the Grand Junction Canal, stands a grim Victorian building which has been empty since 1968 and still awaits demolition. Until 1952 it was a hospital, the London Lock Hospital, and is almost- butI not quite - the last relic of an ancestry that stretches back at least seven hundred years. The word 'lock' is variously derived from the Old French 'loques', meaning rags, the dressings applied to the sores of lepers, or from the idea of the building being isolated and the inmates locked away from the rest of society.1 Whatever the origin of the term, it was originally applied to the lazar house, or leper hospital, in Kent Street (now Tabard Street), Southwark, which was probably founded in the reign of Edward I (1272-1307).2 It was one of ten leper hospitals situated at the time of their foundation well outside London, and which survived until the Reformation. Of the ten, one - that dedicated to St James, which had been founded in about 1100 - was retained by Henry VIII, and converted into St James's Palace; another, St