Private public/ public private

I'm visiting Bart's hospital at the moment.  Established in 1123 (yes, you read that right) and now a PFI hospital.  The diagram of a hospital filling a whole city block (incidentally the only hospital which is also a parish) has obvious issues of overlapping public courtyard space with heavy servicing.  The recent Carillion facelift (ongoing) doesn't seem particularly concerned with resolving these, but accepts them as given conditions.  Smithfield market nearby has similar issues,  but there they strangely feel positive,  because the meat market porters are less intimidating than ambulances and delivery trucks and they still use the old red telephone boxes.

Hospitals are weird places though.  Bart's is owned by the aforementioned PFI contractor,  who also runs it,  but is leased back to the state over a long period.  So is it public,  or private?  Who knows, but I've never understood why hospitals don't stop just about anybody wandering in.  I can make my visits right to the bedside without anyone ever asking what I'm doing.  In fact if you actually need to get some information you have to keep pestering people,  because everyone is so busy.  It would be an interesting experiment to climb into an empty bed,  hook yourself up to the wiring and see how long it takes someone to realise you're not a patient.  As an idea though,  an NHS hospital being a graduated extension of the public realm seems an interesting architectural thesis, yet to be properly realised,  maybe. 

When I go to collect lunch (hospital food is intended to discourage malingering) I wander through nearby paternoster square.  This travesty of a public space has clear design ambitions to be an extension of the public realm,  but of course it's private property; But then, so are many semi-public spaces: churchyards to pick an obvious example. Here its the aggressive, desperate and utterly crap attempt to create a European style square that really depresses me.  Many public spaces are incoherent, but few are so coherently bad. The in-your-face management regime is just another heavy-handed nail in the coffin. 

The City of London remains an amazing place, though, in spite of the Corporation of London's seemingly unstoppable mission to turn it into Canary Wharf.  Walk a little further and you find the most remarkable, unique and beautiful private realms open to, and well-used by the public: Ely Place, the Inns of court and the most famous, but never disappointing Temple.  

Last year we had fun on the MAASD course at UEL with Anna Minton, testing the limits of these spaces and trying to delve into this relationship between physical architecture and the ownership and management of space.  This year Anna joins us as a Reader in Architecture and I'm looking forward to digging a little deeper.