Widwed: Something Historic, Scaffold Hill Hospital

Here's my entry for Bobsblips's Widwed challenge this week.

By UK standards, this isn't all that historic but it does have an interesting history.

I confess to  more or less copying and pasting this from the web as I can't really do better:

"This isolation hospital on the edge of Newcastle was officially opened in 1914 to house sufferers of infectious diseases such as TB, scarlet fever and measles at a time when the “modern treatment” was fresh air away from coal fires and industry. Initially it had 2 wards of 10 beds and was extended with an additional block in 1927 (the one in the photo - see the date on the drainpipe) and by 1934 there were 72 beds. The hospital took military infectious cases during WW2 but switched to care of the elderly as numbers with infectious diseases reduced with improvements in Public Health and medicine.The hospital was closed in 1986. The building is now part of the Countryside Centre at the Rising Sun Country Park. It is hard to imagine that the childhood infections of measles, scarlet fever and diphtheria (now treated with inoculation) could be fatal in the recent past. Few families escaped the experience of losing one or more children up to the 1930s.....Conditions in the isolation hospital were harsh compared with today’s hospitals. Patients were often in for 6-8 weeks and as they were not allowed visitors their relatives could only peer at them through glass partitions. Because of the prolonged bed rest involved in the treatment they were often too weak to walk when they left."


Interestingly my Mum was sent at the age of 6 (in 1927) to a different isolation hospital (Walkergate Hospital) with scarlet fever and spent 3 weeks there with no visitors allowed.

This building actually has more history now than the above quote from the web suggests. It now houses the Tim Lamb Centre ("Pathways for All")  which offers specialist activity and leisure facilities for disabled children/ young people and their families. My Editor visited this morning as for many years she's been a helper at a fortnightly Friday evening club (at a different location) for adults with learning difficulties, which for a variety of reasons has recently had to close. She went along with her colleagues from that club to present a cheque representing the remaining funds of that club as a donation to the Tim Lamb Centre.


(I assume that the name "Scaffold Hill" indicates a history going back further than the hospital but I'm struggling to track down any more information about that.)...PS I've just found out more about it. Seemingly Scaffold Hill is probably named not from the scaffold of a hangman's gallows, but rather from a grandstand that is once thought to have stood here for viewing of horse races on the moor , the area being historically part of Killingworth Moor.)