Mater Hospital, 45-51 Crumlin Road, Belfast, Co Antrim, BT14 6AB

Mater Infirmorum Hospital, 45–51 Crumlin Road, Belfast

The Mater Infirmorum Hospital is a detached, symmetrical, multi-bay, three-storey building over a partial basement, constructed in red brick in a Tudoresque style. It was built around 1900 to the designs of William J. Fennell, who won a competitive selection process from fourteen entries submitted, the winning design being chosen by Thomas Drew, president of the Institute of Irish Architects. The hospital has been in continuous use for over 110 years and was, at the time of its construction, at the forefront of hospital design. Fennell also designed the Maternity Hospital in Townsend Street, Belfast, now demolished, and the Mater represents a good example of his work, demonstrating his interest in patient welfare.

Origins and Historical Background

The hospital stands on the north side of Crumlin Road within its own grounds, on a site with deep roots in the work of the Sisters of Mercy. The foundation stone of St Paul's Convent on the Crumlin Road had been laid on 25th January 1854, and the following year — in September or October 1855 — the Sisters of Mercy laid the foundation stone of the Mater Misericordiae Hospital in Dublin, which was eventually to inspire a similar institution in Belfast. The aims of the order included educating the poor, visiting the sick, and attending to the physical and moral needs of destitute or distressed women.

By 1859 the convent, though still unfinished internally, comprised buildings arranged around a quadrangle including a hall, waiting rooms, sitting rooms for the advanced sisters, day rooms for the younger sisters, refectories, kitchens, cloisters, a reading room and library, a chapel, sacristy, and individual cells for each sister. The school building faced the road; its northern end was devoted to the reception, residence, and support of orphaned children of the poor, who lived there alongside four daughters of soldiers who had fallen in the Crimean War. The school rooms were at the southern end of the building, with large numbers of children attending as day pupils — sometimes as many as 600 across two daily attendances, from 9am to 2.30pm and from 7 to 8.30pm. Some paid a penny a week, though the poorest children paid nothing. The school was under the National Board, and a small number of Protestant children also attended. An inspector in 1869 praised it in the highest terms, remarking that the pupils were "docile, orderly and affectionate" and that there was no school in his district where he felt more comfortable carrying out his duties. The convent was reported still unfinished in 1862, with difficulties in paying for building work at that time.

After the extension of the Industrial Schools Act to Ireland in 1868 — legislation intended to provide for the care of neglected, orphaned, and abandoned children — the sisters founded an industrial school on the site capable of accommodating 90 girls aged between seven and fourteen.

A small grotto was erected in the grounds around 1876 to implore for help in establishing a hospital for the poor of the city. The collections raised subsequently enabled local Bishop Dr Patrick Dorrian to purchase a private dwelling, Bedeque House, just outside the convent walls, to serve as the first hospital in the vicinity. A further £1,000 converted the building into a hospital of 34 beds, opened as the Mater Infirmorum — meaning "Mother of the Sick" — in October 1883. Contemporary photographs show this former hospital building, now gone, as an extraordinary three-storey villa with a verandah spanning its full width at ground floor level, surmounted by an oriel at first floor level, said to have been built on a South American colonial model around 1852.

Although the quality of care was high, the number of beds was inadequate for the local population. On Bishop Dorrian's death in 1884, the hospital was handed over to trustees who carried forward his wish that it be enlarged and made suitable for medical education. At this time, Catholics were forbidden to enter the Queen's Colleges and therefore had to obtain medical training in Dublin — a city considered to be fraught with moral dangers. Belfast's population explosion in the second half of the 19th century had also left it very poorly provided with hospital accommodation.

In September 1894 a building fund was inaugurated at a public meeting in St Mary's Hall. A terrace of seven houses adjoining Bedeque House had been purchased as the site for the new hospital. The site was described at the time as "one of the most healthy situations in the whole city; it was on an elevated site, and was clear from the smoke from the mills and factories that were to be found in other parts of the city." A contract was eventually signed with the contractor Messrs Henry Laverty & Sons on 1st January 1896, and the hospital opened on 23rd April 1900, the opening ceremony performed by the Lord Mayor, Sir Robert McConnell, and attended by dignitaries including the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava and Gustav Wolff. Valuation records of 1900 list the building at £1,450.

Design and Planning Principles

The building was laid out on the pavilion plan, a system widely favoured at the time because it was thought to inhibit the spread of disease by isolating wards from one another. The wards were contained in pavilions attached to the administrative core by corridors. The Belfast Newsletter described the hospital in 1897 as "one of the most scientifically planned and best equipped hospitals in the United Kingdom," adding: "The pavilion system of architectural construction is A1 among the systems on which hospital buildings can be arranged. It secures direct ventilation through and through; it obviates the otherwise necessary ventilation by flues or shafts; it affords a better light and a purer atmosphere and renders possible a lightness of architectural construction, which in the new Mater Hospital is most agreeably apparent."

The ground floor was elevated to allow air to circulate beneath as well as around and above the buildings. The central administrative block was flanked by a pavilion block on the east side for male patients and one on the west side for female patients. Originally these were connected to the administration block at ground floor level only. Each pavilion contained two large wards on each floor, with corner towers providing sanitary facilities. Verandahs were provided at the gable ends for convalescent patients. Each pavilion had a wide staircase containing a hoist for patients too ill to sit or stand. One hundred and thirty-seven beds were planned, as well as eight cots for children.

The administration block contained nurses' bed and day rooms, as well as ground floor reception rooms, offices, and the rooms of resident medical officers. To the rear of the block was the chapel, and branching off the rear of the administration block were single-storey rooms containing observation wards and recovery wards for use after operations, with operating rooms to the rear of the chapel. To the north-west of the administration building were students' rooms, a lecture theatre, and a kitchen range facing across a yard to the laundry range, which contained receiving rooms, washrooms, drying rooms, disinfecting chambers, stores, ironing rooms, and boiler and engine houses. On the west side of the yard stood the stable, mortuary, and post-mortem room. An outpatients or "exterior" department occupied the front portion of the ground floor of the west pavilion, comprising a large waiting room and three consulting rooms with dressing rooms off, described as arranged "to secure every privacy for patients."

The buildings were heated by steam and lit by electricity. Electric current was also used to drive the laundry machinery, to work the hoists, and to cook in the ward kitchens. A novel feature was the introduction of garden roofs over the pavilions, a feature suggested by the Superioress; these were constructed by the Vulcanite Roofing Company of Donegall Street and were laid out in grass plots and flower beds so that convalescent patients could breathe fresh air, enjoy the views, or even play bowls or tennis. The hospital was fitted with NAP windows supplied by a Westminster firm, whose revolutionary design allowed the outside of the windows to be cleaned from within, and the sliding sashes to be fixed louvre-style to increase ventilation. The construction cost was estimated at £35,000.

Exterior Description

The complex is a busy composition in a late Victorian idiom employing Tudor and Gothic devices. The roofs are pitched natural slate with roll-moulded terracotta ridge tiles and several profiled red brick chimneystacks with terracotta pots. The roofs are set behind slightly raised gables with moulded limestone coping and decorative kneeler stones. Moulded steel guttering runs to a moulded eaves course, with cast-iron and plastic downpipes. The walls are machine-made red brick laid in Flemish bond, with a projecting red brick plinth course at basement level having a chamfered limestone trim. Window openings are largely segmental-headed, formed in gauged brick with bowtel-moulded surrounds, moulded limestone sills, and uPVC windows.

The symmetrical front elevation is four windows wide at second floor level. The central block has a decorative gable, a projecting limestone entrance porch, and two-storey castellated bays set diagonally to each corner. A pair of single-bay three-storey wings flank the central section, each fronted by a two-storey canted bay with set-back connecting bays to either side. Multi-bay three-storey castellated advanced blocks flank the entire composition, each framed by a pair of full-height advanced canted castellated towers.

The central section's decorative gable is surmounted by a limestone cross and contains a trefoil canopied niche housing a stone statue of Mary resting on a base supported on clustered colonettes with foliate corbelling and capital. Below the gable, a three-sided canted bay to the first floor is formed in limestone ashlar with a castellated red brick parapet and Gothic window openings with transoms and original leaded coloured glazing to the overlights. This bay window rests on a rectangular-plan buttressed entrance porch with an elaborately carved tripartite limestone ashlar front and red brick cheeks. The three-centred compound moulded door opening is flanked by pointed-headed cusped sidelights with splayed sills and replacement glazed door and glazing. The entrance is decorated with carved foliate spandrels above, framed by a continuous hood moulding, with a painted panel over bearing raised lettering reading "MATER INFIRMORUM HOSPITAL." The door opens onto a replacement masonry-clad platform and flight of steps enclosed by a low red brick raking wall with moulded limestone coping, terminated by a pair of limestone pedestals supporting decorative cast-iron lamps.

The diagonal two-storey bay windows have slender three-centred arched window openings, paired to the front with continuous terracotta hood mouldings, surmounted by castellations. Set back between the central block and the gabled wings is a single-bay connecting wing, originally single-storey and infilled by a further two storeys around 1980. The gabled wings are abutted by two-storey canted bays with castellated parapets and transomed window openings formed in limestone, with some original overlights remaining. Tripartite windows appear at second floor level throughout, with continuous terracotta hood mouldings. The west wing has an ogee retaining wall enclosing the basement area.

The advanced blocks have castellated parapets rising to a central gable surmounted by a limestone cross, with a blind red brick roundel to each gable. All window openings have continuous terracotta hood mouldings spanning across the towers. Concrete balconies span the space between the towers at first and second floor levels, fitted with decorative cast-iron bellied balustrades. Below the first floor balcony of the west block is a three-sided canted infill bay, with a later infill to the east block.

The west side elevation is more planar, with an advanced full-height single-bay gabled projection having limestone coping and a cross. Window openings on this elevation are plainer segmental-headed with sandstone sills, abutted by two chimneystacks.

The multi-bay three-storey rear elevation is abutted by later single-storey accretions and a four-storey modern terracotta-clad extension built around 2010. This extension houses a full-height atrium incorporating an elaborate Gothic stone doorcase, repositioned from the rear of the chapel and inserted into a prefabricated wall. The chapel projects beyond the rear elevation and is surmounted by a further two storeys with tall square-headed windows containing bipartite cusped openings with leaded coloured glazing. The multi-bay three-storey over-basement east side elevation is detailed similarly to the west, with an enclosed glass-clad walkway connecting the Dorrian to the MacCauley Building, added around 1980.

Setting

The hospital is set within its own grounds on the north side of Crumlin Road, with a tarmacadam front area enclosed by a low red brick wall with limestone coping and decorative wrought-iron railings, with matching gates supported on elaborate limestone ashlar piers with Gothic carvings. Its public setting survives to a degree in that the building still addresses the Crumlin Road behind its walls and railings. The complex forms a group with the former Nurses' Home. Although compromised by modern extensions and other buildings, the hospital remains a good example of the type.

Subsequent History and Alterations

The Mater was recognised as a teaching hospital by Queen's University following the implementation of the Irish Universities Act of 1908, and links with the Royal Victoria Hospital were closely maintained. In the mid-1930s a new nurses' home was completed to designs by Francis McArdle, and an extern department was added to designs by Young & Mackenzie. A maternity wing was housed in a nearby terrace from 1945. After 1948 the hospital was maintained largely through the fundraising efforts of the Young Philanthropists' Association, who raised money initially through social events such as bands and concerts, and later through the YP Pools. In 1972, with costs having become ever more burdensome, the hospital became integrated with the Health Service.

A new nine-storey block, designed by Kennedy Fitzgerald Associates at a cost of £9 million, was completed in 1989, containing Accident and Emergency, Outpatients, Radiology, an operating theatre suite, and a 35-bed maternity unit. Todd Architects won a design competition in 1996 to redevelop the Mater with a £13 million budget; as part of this process the convent to the rear was demolished in 1997 and replaced by a new main building, although the original convent entrance was retained. Two new wards costing £3.5 million were opened in December 2004, a project that entailed the alteration and refurbishment of the rear wing of the original hospital with exposed red brick retained. Further refurbishment work has since taken place within the listed block.