Outpatients Hall (To Rear Of Nos 45-51, Out Patients Department Of Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital)

Waiting Hall to the Out Patients' Department of the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital

This waiting hall was built in 1927 to designs by HF Murrell and RM Pigott as part of the new outpatients' department of the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital. It superseded an earlier outpatients' department in a block dating from 1908 immediately to the north. The building is constructed in grey brick in the Roman Classical style.

The structure is rectangular in plan, comprising five bays with a flat roof. A long, full-height waiting room rises above a lower, one-storey range of top-lit consulting rooms positioned around the east and west sides, with an operating theatre on the north side. Each of these rooms is accessed directly from the main hall.

The interior features a vaulted and coffered ceiling lit by a clerestorey of metal-framed Diocletian windows with pale coloured glass set in lunettes. A triple-light window is positioned at the east end. Original pendant lights hang from the ceiling. Pilasters divide the bays, and a pair of Tuscan columns stands to the west. The floor is tiled. Entrances to the consulting rooms are set within each bay, framed by broad, shallow-moulded architraves. Some retain original veneered flush panelled double doors with porthole windows; the entrance to the first bay is blocked.

The hall is distinguished by an extensive programme of mural decoration in oil on canvas, covering approximately 90 square metres. Contemporary panels were painted by Nan West. The principal subject matter features the months and seasons of the year, extending along the entire length of the north and south walls. The east wall displays the largest individual scene, depicting figures picnicking in a landscape setting representing summer. Other scenes are set within the bays between pilasters and above and beside doorways. Upper bay areas and spaces below the windows are decorated with narrower rectangular panels displaying painted swags and floral motifs. The style is influenced by French Post-Impressionism. The consulting rooms have been altered internally.

Nan West (born 1904), a painter, decorator and illuminator, was the daughter of Henry West, Chairman of the Trustees of the RNOH. She trained at the Slade School of Art under Henry Tonks, who championed 'a vigorous defence of the traditional spirit in art' and encouraged art students to paint murals in public buildings to restore a social function for art. West's career flourished between 1922 and 1937, a period during which she assisted Rex Whistler in decorating the Tate Gallery restaurant and produced a smaller Noah's Ark scene at the Child Welfare Clinic, Chelsea. Her murals for Simpson's Tea Rooms in Piccadilly do not survive.

The murals represent one of the largest mural cycles of the inter-war period surviving in London and exemplify Tonks's policy of promoting art in public spaces. The austere classicism of the architecture provides an elegant framework for West's informal painted scheme. The murals are exceptionally rare as examples of a type which was never numerous and remains especially vulnerable to alteration. They also represent an important example of a tradition of female mural artists working in the inter-war years, alongside Mary Adshead, Daphne Baring, Evelyn Dunbar, Mildred Edridge and Violet Martin, whose work is highly regarded.