Trafalgar Hospital

A few days after Christmas 2006, I happened to be walking along Mortimer Street for reasons I don't rightly recollect, sober but still a little the worse for the previous night's wear. It was a pleasant afternoon by late December standards and I felt oddly euphoric after picking up a couple of books from UCL's DMS Watson Science Library pertaining to my first case essay.

Something that used to be a significant landmark thereabouts was a core chunk of the Middlesex Hospital, with which I became sadly familiar thanks to Bruce's lover Richard spending time there as a patient back in the early 1990s when the couple were holidaying in London. It's closed down now, and the site is being redeveloped into apartments and business space, no doubt at great profit to UCL, whose NHS trust absorbed the Middlesex sometime before.

In any case, I was walking past, and found myself suddenly shifted into an alternative universe because the well known building was here labelled, in seemingly permanent carved letters in the stone above the entranceway, Trafalgar Hospital. Exactly matching the style and apparent age of the old Middlesex Hospital legend I knew so well.

I boggled.

And then, after a few moments, noticed the ARRI trucks parked in the lot out front, and realised that the old place was standing in for some fictional locale on the big or small screen. Such things happen frequently in London, although rarely so seamlessly integrated with the familiar landscape.

Google was not able to provide me with any information at the time (it now lists a blog post from a few days later that seems very relevant but alas is not responding just now, so I can't properly check), and I sort of forgot about it except for a few occasions when I bored friends with the story.

Anyway, tonight we finally got around to watching David Cronenberg's grim but excellent Eastern Promises, and fairly early on creepy Armin Mueller-Stahl asks Naomi Watts something like "have you always worked at Trafalgar Hospital?"

"At last!" I cried, to Ian's initial bafflement. And, sure enough, a while later the entrance appeared, just as I remembered.

Obviously, none of this is of the slightest significance to anyone but me. But it's nice to have one of life's little mysteries solved.
Posted by matt at May 10, 2008 11:43 PM