Hard work at Mildmay

eeee but I do like a colourful map. Sadiq Khan, the colourful Mayor of London has commissioned some bling on the TfL map of railed traffic routes. When I lived close to the end of the Central Line as a teenager, The Tube was transport into and around the capital . . . and a lot of walking. I only used buses and overground rail when I was off somewhere else - Dover for Paris, Holyhead for Dublin, Edinburgh, Harwich for Hoek. The [Victorian] Overground rail lines providing local sub-urban services round London were there when I could have used them in the 1970s but I wasn't sufficient of a trainspotting rail-nerd to ferret them out. And I didn't know anyone or anything in Stoke Newington.

I referenced Harry Beck's iconic primary coloured Tube map when I was writing about the District Line in 2016. The Overground was codified and coordinated at the end of the 20thC and finally added to the TfL map in 2007 in a uniform [background] orange drab. I guess it kept the grockles out and left more seats for tired indigenous commuters, carers and shoppers. Now 6 routes have been given distinctive colours and new names. Liberty - Lioness - Mildmay - Suffragette - Weaver - Windrush. The names are all chosen for earnestly inclusive reasons. Pity really, some local users already refer to the Gospel Oak to Barking route as The Goblin Line which could have stuck. But The Man would call it Suffragette because a very old acquaintance of Emily Pankhurst lived near the route in Barking until 1996.

We perked up at the news on BBC because one of our oldest friends escaped from Clonmel and lives on Mildmay Road in (increasingly trendy) Dalston. I figured there might be a station at the end of their street which named the whole route. But No: Mildmay is named for Mildmay Mission Hospital which is in Bethnal Green 2km S of our pal's gaff. Who knew? That's a rabbit hole to scuttle down. The Hospital was carved out of an unused warehouse in 1877 and then moved to Austen Street in 1892 to service the stews and slums of East London. It was closed in 1982 during one of the great churning re-organisations periodically ordained by the NHS. Small, local hospitals were no longer fit for purpose in the economies of scale, high-tech mindset then (and now) current in both our polities. Mildmay got a new lease of life in 1985 as an AIDS hospice and was haunted by Princess Diana until her untimely death.

More recently Mildmay is operating as a charitable trust, largely dependent in contract work from the NHS. It is well suited as a step down care-centre to free up acute beds in all-singing, all-dancing larger hospitals. But every week Mildmay bewails its count of empty beds. The beds are a fixed cost for the shoe-string enterprise that is Mildmay and have to be filled (on contract) to keep the charitable trust in the Black. But discharge from acute to step-down is in the gift of the nearest Integrated Care Board (ICB) which replaced clinical commissioning groups (CCG) in 2022 which replaced strategic health authorities (SHA) and primary care trusts (PCT) in 2012 to "organise" the delivery of NHS services. That's A Lot of three letter acronyms (TLA) and a lot of moving the deck-chairs change of admin, with the result that sick people suffer on trolleys in A&E and different sick people are not being shifted through to Mildmay.

Pictured above with Mayor Khan is Comfort Sagoe recently retired as Lead Clinical Nurse at Mildmay. Talk about nominative determinism with Comfort, who was recruited from West Africa 20 years ago because Brits don't do bed-pans. In 2020, I had a rant about putting up a statue to not-a-nurse Mary Seacole outside St. Thomas's Hospital in Westminster . . . because she black and she 19thC. At the end of my thesis on the fatuity of virtue signalling I entered a plea "It's 70 years since - Windrush -Generation nurses started to arrive in Britain from Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados: surely some of them gave a lifetime of brilliant, thankless, sterling work in British hospitals. What about a statue to one of them?"

Done!  LC Nurse Comfort Segoe will be too modest to model but I propose a statue to her at one end or the other of the Mildmay Line.