Old Sydenham building awaits its fate

Press, 21 April 1982, Page 21

Old Sydenham building awaits its fate

The fall of an auctioneer’s hammer on April 22 may seal the fate of an old building in Sydenham which has a long and interesting history. If Langford House, on the comer of Durham and Battersea Streets, is demolished by its new owner — the property is being offered as industrial land ripe for development — the loss to Christchurch will not be great. Any architectural character the building had has long since been' lost to modernisation and improvement. But the building’s history is worth recording on the eye of what seems likely to be its last days. The building has had three lives. The first was short lived. The building was built, about 1890, as the Sydenham Hotel. But Sydenham, in the 1890 s, was a hotbed of prohibition, and the hotel was closed in 1895 by the licensing authorities as a result of the local successes of prohibitionists in the licensing pbns.

In about 1906 the building was converted to serve as Seddon House, a Government nursing home, but this use was so brief it scarcely constitutes a separate chapter in the building’s life. In 1907 it became St Helen’s Maternity Hospital, which it remained until the early 19505, when the new St Helens (nowknown as Christchurch Women’s) Hospital was opened on Colombo Street north. A new obstetric hospital to replace the Sydenham St Helens was planned in the late 19305, but building did not begin until after the war and the new St Helens was not opened until June, 1952. The old Sydenham building was then bought by the Canterbury Aged People’s Welfare Council, modernised and renovated in 1955, and reopened as Langford House, the name commemorating the work done by the coun-

cil’s first secretary, Mr T. H. Langford. By the 1950 s the wooden parapet and glassed-in corner balcony, supported on handsome cast-iron pillars, had gone and the weatherboard had disappeared behind that curse of old wooden buildings of character — stucco. Only the mouldings above the windows, supported on carved brackets, remain as a reminder of the building’s formerly more imposing appearance. No longer needed by the Aged People’s Welfare Council, the old hotel, maternity hospital and old people’s home awaits its fate, looking somewhat forlorn. It is one of those buildings for which demolition seems a kinder fate, after so many years of service, than being pressed into some undignified new industrial use and, probably, being allowed to deteriorate slowly.

By

JOHN WILSON