Hospital chapel

Press, 2 June 1989, Page 8

Hospital chapel

Sir,—Once again the Historic Places Trust comes charging in with an eleventh-hour cavalry charge; once again threatening to change a building classification to prevent its demolition when it has known well in advance of the peril. I find it irriting that an organisation that would be lucky to muster 300 hard-core members can disrupt the progress of a new medical facility that will benefit the health of 300,000 Cantabrians, as well as the people who will work in it. If God wanted us to remain cavemen he would have seen to it. Instead, he gave us the ability to advance; to improve ourselves and our environment. Let the hospital chapel continue its work within this framework. Its location within the new hospital will be a benefit to users and, no doubt, increase its profile. The memory for which the chapel was built will always live on; more so now than if it remains where it is. — Yours, etc., lAN HOBBS. May 30, 1989.

Sir,—To advocate any one course of action over the chapel, as pursued by your correspondents and other officials in the past two or three years, presents a dilemma because not enough is known to the general public of the exact and final location of hospital buildings under construction and newly completed. This has a bearing on where best to actually situate this picturesque small building relative to the needs of staff and patients. My suggestion would be to move it nearer the river and garden side of the hospital grounds. This would allow room and more time, independent of building programmes, to dismantle the whole structure and re-erect the brick shell. The days of horsedrawn and low-scale traffic have passed since it was first built and the sentiments of historical associations should be paramount in preserving the

chapel more or less as we now known it, certainly in more congenial surroundings — Yours, etc.,

WILLIAM LEAMON. May 30, 1989.