Selly Oak Hospital - a beacon of hope in Birmingham

May 28 2010 By Chris Upton

As 139 years of history at Selly Oak Hospital draws to an end, Chris Upton looks at how the facility grew out of a workhouse.

Over the next few weeks one of the strangest migrations ever to take place in Birmingham, a city well used to migrations, will be underway. The patients of Selly Oak Hospital, the nurses, ancillary staff and doctors, will be making the mile or journey from Raddlebarn Road to the new Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Edgbaston.

A new era for the NHS in Birmingham – exciting enough for the Labour Party to have launched its election campaign from there – will likewise mark the end of an era for Selly Oak. The last patient will leave the old hospital 139 years after the first one was wheeled in.

Selly Oak Hospital had opened its doors in December 1879 to receive its first two patients, and for a building project that appeared to have been going on forever it was a dramatic and hurried opening. The first two admissions had smallpox.

To understand what went awry, you first need to know that Selly Oak was built, not as a hospital, but as a workhouse. It was the much-vaunted Kings Norton Union Workhouse, built to replace the old parish workhouse on Kings Norton Green, which dated back to 1803.

After the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 the workhouse on The Green no longer had to look after the paupers and indigent sick of Kings Norton alone. It was now the headquarters of a much larger unit, known as a union, which encompassed Northfield, Beoley, Harborne and Smethwick.

Endemically reluctant to spend money, the authorities at Kings Norton – the Poor Law guardians – spent a generation trying to squeeze more and more patients into the old workhouse, and resist the increasingly vociferous calls by the Poor Law inspector to abandon it and build afresh elsewhere. Only in 1868 did they finally succumb to the pressure.

A site in Selly Oak was chosen because it was bang in the middle of the new union, half-way between Kings Norton village and the growing town of Smethwick.

The estimated cost for the new workhouse at Selly Oak came to £21,700, though even the most optimistic of guardians could hardly have been confident about this. Such building projects, by their very nature, overrun or hit unforeseen snags. The final delivery cost, three-an-a-half years later, was actually £27, 758 5s 8d, almost 30 per cent above the initial figure.