Down Cambridge Heath Road to Whitechapel, with a brief break at the Carpenter's Arms on the way, because the weather had gone 180 degrees again while I wasn't looking. Down to where Mile End Road meets Whitechapel Road E1, and the Royal London Hospital. You can't get a view of the Hospital's gigantic front edifice that excludes the stalls of Whitechapel Markets along the opposite side of the road; both institutions have been there some time. Lots of the Hospital has changed over the years since its most famous patient, Joseph Carey Merrick of Leicester, aka The Elephant Man, lived here for the last few brief but happy years of his life. The original shop directly across from the entrance where Dr Frederick Treves first saw Merrick exhibited still stands, but is now a garish and jolly saree emporium. In the Hospital itself, Treves has had a ward named after him, Francis Carr-Gomm's name sits on the list of Heads of the Hospital in the front reception hall, but what remained of Merrick's rooms in Bedstead Square, after scoring a direct hit in the Blitz and then being renovated inside to store hospital silver and refrigerators, was finally finished off a mere handful of years ago when the surviving door and window of his rooms were removed and bricked up. That whole section of the hospital is now gazetted for demolition. History, albeit on a small and personal scale, gone. Very un-British.
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