LOST HOSPITALS OF LONDON

Angas Convalescent Home
 Church Approach, Cudham, Bromley, Kent TN14 7QF
Medical dates:

Medical character:
1918 - 1994

Convalescent.  Later, mental handicap.

In 1917, at the Annual Meeting of the Seamen's Hospital Society, Sir Rosslyn Wemyss and Sir Henry Jackson raised an Appeal for funds to establish a convalescent home for sailors recovering from treatment at the Dreadnought Seamen's Hospital.

In response to this, in 1918 a Mrs Angas, of Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, purchased the former vicarage in Cudham for use as such a home.  The house had been built in the 1880s for the parish of St Peter and St Paul; the freehold estate included 18 acres of well-wooded grounds.

The Angas Convalescent Home opened on 8th July 1918.  It was managed by the Seamen's Hospital Society and had 30 beds.

At the end of WW1 schoolchildren endowed a 'Schools Bed' as a memorial to the bravery of seamen during the war.

By the early 1920s more accommodation was needed and a 2-storey extension was built.  It was opened by Mrs Angas on 11th September 1925.  The Home then had 42 beds.

In 1948 the Home joined the NHS along with its parent hospital and the other hospitals managed by the Seamen's Hospital Society - the Albert Dock Hospital and the Tilbury Seamen's Hospital.  It was under the control of the Seamen's Hospital Management Committee, part of the South East Regional Hospital Board.

Following a major reorganisation of the NHS in 1974, the Home ceased to be a convalescent home for seamen on 1st April.  It came under the control of the Bromley District Health Authority, part of the South East Thames Regional Health Authority. It became Angas Home, a residential home with 33 beds for mentally handicapped patients,  until 1994, when it finally closed.


Present status (January 2011)

The building remained vacant and, after ten years, had became dilapidated.  By 2004 it was owned by the Bromley Primary Care Trust, who decided to sell it.


Update:  March 2013

The property was been sold and completely renovated.  In 2012 Angas House, a 6-bedroomed property in 3 acres of grounds was offered for sale at an asking price of just under £3m.

The building is locally listed.

Angas Home
The building has not changed much over the years (see below), although the tower is much reduced.

Angas Home
The two-storey extension at the back of the house was built in 1925.

Angas Home
NHS signage for Angas Home remains in situ in 2011, despite it having closed in 1994.
Angas Home
Patients and staff outside the Angas Convalsecent Home. perhaps in 1918.

(Photograph reproduced by kind permission of
robmcrorie - flickr)

Angas Home
The Dining Room of the Convalescent Home.

(Photograph reproduced by kind permission of
robmcrorie - flickr)
References
(Author unstated) 1920 Proposed sanatorium of merchant seamen.  British Medical Journal 1 (3085), 229.

Cook GC 1999 The Seamen's Hospital Society: a progenitor of the tropical institutions.  Postgraduate Medical Journal 75, 715-717.

Cook GC 2007 Disease in the Merchant Navy: A History of the Seamen's Hospital Society.  Oxford, Radcliffe.

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