London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets Ahead.
Story time.
History time.
“What’s she got?”
The medical student peers up at the giant painting.
The instructor waits.
“Come on then. What’s she suffering from?”
A pause.
The student studies the woman more carefully.
“Consumption?”
“Perhaps.”
The instructor points to another figure.
“And him?”
Another diagnosis.
Another patient.
Another ailment.
Except these patients aren’t in hospital beds.
They’re in a painting.
A gigantic painting.
And the classroom isn’t a lecture theatre.
It’s a staircase.
Welcome to one of the most extraordinary places in London.
The Hogarth Stair at Barts.
Yes, Barts. St Bartholomew’s Hospital. Founded in 1123. Nine centuries old and still doing business.
And yes, those paintings really were used as teaching aids well into the nineteenth century.
Medical students were brought here. Figures in the paintings were pointed out. Diagnoses were requested.
“What’s she got?”
“What’s he suffering from?”
Art becoming medicine.
Medicine becoming art.
Only in London.
And what a London story it is.
If you’re following our recommended Hogarth Trail, this is your Tuesday stop.
Monday afternoon, Rick Jones takes you through the treasures of Tate Britain.
Wednesday afternoon, Ronnie Haydon walks you through the Georgian underworld on her splendid Gin Lane walk.
And in between, on Tuesday, comes a visit to Barts and Sir John Soane’s Museum.
Forty-eight hours.
A concentrated dose of Georgian London.
The sort of outing that leaves you seeing London differently.
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Now here’s the first thing to know about those paintings.
They weren’t painted by some celebrated artist parachuted in from the West End.
This was home ground.
Not merely nearby.
Here.
William Hogarth was born in Bartholomew Close, just a stone’s throw from where those paintings now hang.
He was baptised in St Bartholomew-the-Great.
His father was buried there.
His great public commission was undertaken there.
And the paintings are still hanging there nearly three centuries later.
Almost an entire life mapped onto a handful of streets.
That’s very London.
This city is full of those astonishingly compressed geographies where an entire life can be contained within a few hundred yards.
In other words, when Hogarth came to Barts in the 1730s he wasn’t arriving as an outsider.
He was coming home.
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And what a homecoming it was.
The hospital governors had ambitious plans.
They wanted new buildings.
They wanted grandeur.
They wanted to impress wealthy benefactors.
So they brought in one of the great architects of the age.
James Gibbs.
Now there’s a name worth lingering over.
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Because Gibbs wasn’t just any architect.
He’s the man who gave London St Martin-in-the-Fields.
You know the one.
The church with the soaring steeple.
The church that appears on Christmas cards, guidebooks and London souvenirs.
We naturally think of St Martin-in-the-Fields as Trafalgar Square’s church.
But when James Gibbs designed it there was no Trafalgar Square.
The church got there first.
And there’s another Hogarth connection.
By the time he painted the Barts canvases, Hogarth was living in Leicester Fields, today’s Leicester Square, only a short walk away.
Artist and architect helping to shape Georgian London from opposite ends of the same neighbourhood.
The church was very much part of Hogarth’s London.
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At Barts, Gibbs designed the splendid Great Hall, one of the finest Georgian interiors in the capital.
And naturally enough, a grand hall demanded a grand staircase.
Hogarth wanted the commission.
Wanted it badly.
So badly, in fact, that he offered to paint the enormous canvases for nothing.
Imagine that.
One of Britain’s greatest artists saying, in effect, “Give me the wall. I’ll provide the masterpiece.”
The result was two huge paintings.
The Pool of Bethesda.
The Good Samaritan.
Biblical subjects.
But treated in a very Hogarthian way.
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That’s to say, they look less like saints descending from heaven and more like people you’ve just encountered on the streets of Smithfield.
Or, more probably, patients on a hospital ward.
Because that’s exactly what happened.
Hogarth used Barts’ patients as models for some of the figures in the paintings.
That’s part of their fascination.
Hogarth wasn’t interested in idealised perfection.
He was interested in people.
Real people.
London people.
Faces with character.
Bodies marked by hardship.
Expressions that tell stories.
And that’s precisely why generations of medical students were made to hone their diagnostic skills on that staircase.
Look closely and you see blindness.
The ravages of late-stage syphilis.
Deformity.
Frailty.
——————
A catalogue of eighteenth-century suffering.
Which is why the paintings were pressed into service as teaching aids. Not exactly what Hogarth had in mind perhaps.
But wonderfully London.
The staircase itself is a piece of theatre. Medical drama. Medical history.
As you climb, the paintings gradually reveal themselves.
You catch glimpses.
Fragments.
Faces.
Colours.
Then you reach the landing.
Suddenly the whole spectacle opens before you.
It’s magnificent.
And beyond it lies the Great Hall.
A room that never fails to stop people in their tracks.
A soaring ceiling.
Rich plasterwork.
Portraits.
Donor boards recording centuries of generosity.
Names stretching back through the ages.
The whole place feels like a monument to one of London’s finest instincts: looking after other people.
Which is, of course, exactly what The Good Samaritan is about.
That’s why these paintings belong here.
They aren’t decoration.
They’re a statement of purpose.
Compassion.
Duty.
Care.
The values on which the hospital was founded.
The values that still sustain it nine hundred years later.
And perhaps that’s why the paintings have such power.
They’re not hidden away in a gallery.
They’re not behind ropes.
They’re not detached from the world that inspired them.
They’re exactly where they were meant to be.
In a working hospital.
Outside, ambulances still arrive.
Around the hospital, doctors and nurses in scrubs are still doing what Barts has been doing for more than nine hundred years.
Healing people.
Three centuries after Hogarth painted them, the paintings are still part of that world.
Which somehow feels exactly right.
So if you’re doing the Hogarth Trail, don’t miss Barts.
The Tate gives you Hogarth the artist.
Soane’s gives you Hogarth the storyteller.
Ronnie Haydon gives you Hogarth’s London.
But Barts gives you something else.
It gives you Hogarth on home turf.
Not merely nearby.
Here.
Born in Bartholomew Close.
Baptised in St Bartholomew-the-Great.
His father buried there.
His great public commission undertaken there.
The paintings still hanging there nearly three centuries later.
Almost an entire life mapped onto a handful of streets.
And while you’re standing there on that staircase, looking up at those giant canvases, ask yourself the question those medical students once heard.
“What’s she got?”
“How about this one over here?”
You may find yourself looking far more closely than you’d planned.
And as long as we’re at it, here’s a peek under the bonnet.
The Hogarth Trail began life as a newsletter problem.
I wanted to showcase two excellent walks.
Rick Jones’s Tate Britain tour on Monday afternoon.
And Ronnie Haydon’s Gin Lane – Hogarth’s London on Wednesday afternoon.
But I didn’t want to put them into the newsletter cold.
“Here’s a walk.”
“Here’s another walk.”
That felt a bit flat.
The thing is, both walks are shot through with Hogarth.
Ronnie’s walk is all about Hogarth’s London.
And Tate Britain showcases some of Hogarth’s greatest paintings.
So there was clearly a connection there.
But I found myself thinking: If Rick’s Tate Britain tour and Ronnie’s Gin Lane walk are a pair of gemstones, surely there ought to be a setting for them.
Some way of joining the dots.
Then it hit home.
This is Hogarth’s town.
The Tate Britain has Hogarth.
Barts has Hogarth.
Soane’s has Hogarth.
Ronnie’s walk has Hogarth.
The pieces were already on the board.
All I had to do was join them up.
The setting turned out to be staring me in the face.
The Hogarth Stair at Barts.
And nearby Sir John Soane’s Museum, home to A Rake’s Progress.
And as luck would have it, the practicalities fell into place.
Rick’s Tate Britain tour takes place on Monday afternoon.
Ronnie’s Gin Lane walk takes place on Wednesday afternoon.
Sir John Soane’s Museum is closed on Mondays.
The public opening days for the Hogarth Stair are Mondays, Tuesdays and the first Sunday of the month.
Well, there it was.
Tuesday.
Barts and Soane’s.
The connective tissue.
An idea was born.
The Hogarth Trail.
Start your week with forty-eight hours in Hogarth’s London.
Now the funny thing is, once you start looking at London this way, one thing tends to lead to another.
You start with a Tate Britain Tour.
It’s chock-a-bloc with Hogarth masterpieces.
You’ve primed the Hogarth pump.
Hogarth takes you to Barts.
Barts takes you to Smithfield.
Smithfield takes you to Rahere.
Rahere takes you back nine hundred years.
But Hogarth is the constant, the undercurrent. So you’re off to Sir John Soane’s Museum.
Which takes you to A Rake’s Progress.
And hey presto you’re right back to Hogarth.
It’s like dominoes. Gin Lane and Ronnie Haydon’s Walk coming up.
And before you know it half of Georgian London has wandered into the room.
That’s one of the things I love most about this city.
Nothing stays in its lane.
Everything connects to everything else.
Pull on one thread and three more come away in your hand.
You think you’re looking at a painting.
You discover a hospital.
You think you’re visiting a hospital.
You discover an artist’s childhood.
You think you’re following an artist.
You find yourself in a church, a square, a museum, a market, a coffee house and a walk.
London is like that.
A gigantic web of stories.
Or perhaps a gigantic attic.
Open one dusty box and there’s another one behind it.
And another behind that.
Of course, a newsletter entry only has room for fifty or sixty words.
You can only do so much with fifty or sixty words.
And that got me thinking.
Why not take one element of the trail and give it the London Calling treatment?
Why not linger for a while on the Hogarth Stair?
Why not spend a few minutes with those medical students standing on that staircase, trying to diagnose ailments from a painting?
Which is how today’s episode came about.
That’s how it sometimes works here.
One thing leads to another.
One London story opens a door and behind it there’s another London story waiting patiently to be discovered.
That’s London for you.
See you tomorrow.