Royal Hospital Haslar: The Largest Brick Building in Europe, Built to Mend Sailors

Built on an Almost Unbelievable Scale

The site at Gosport was acquired in 1745 and its foundations laid the following year, but the hospital designed by architect Theodore Jacobsen did not actually open until 23 October 1753, with its side wings not fully completed until 1762.

It was designed to hold some 1,500 patients, a capacity soon expanded to 1,800 and, by 1790, to as many as 2,100, with additional overflow patients housed on prison hulks moored nearby.

Those numbers are worth converting into something imaginable. Two thousand one hundred beds in 1790 made Haslar larger than the great majority of English towns. Gosport itself had perhaps a few thousand inhabitants. There were market towns in Hampshire with fewer people in them than this hospital had patients.

And it filled up, repeatedly, for two centuries. Casualties from HMS Victory and the rest of the fleet came ashore here after Trafalgar, and the same wards took men from the Crimea, the Western Front, the Atlantic convoys and Normandy.

The finished building cost more than one hundred thousand pounds, nearly double the price of the Admiralty's own headquarters in London, and it was, by most contemporary accounts, the largest hospital in the world at the time of its opening and the largest brick-built structure anywhere in Europe.

The Walls Were to Keep the Patients In

There is one fact about Haslar that explains its architecture better than anything else, and it is not a flattering one. The hospital is surrounded by a high wall, and the wall was not built to keep anybody out. It was built to stop the patients getting away.

The men in those beds were, in very large part, pressed men. They had been taken by force off merchant ships, out of harbourside pubs and off the streets of port towns, and they had not chosen any of it. A hospital was the first time since being taken that a man was ashore, off his ship, and not under the eye of his own officers. As soon as he could walk, a great many of them walked.

The Navy's response was to lock all the ground floor doors at night and to bring in a guard of soldiers from Fort Monckton to patrol the perimeter and bring back anybody who got over the wall. So the largest brick building in Europe, put up at enormous expense to heal sailors, spent decades functioning simultaneously as a prison, and both descriptions were accurate at the same time.

It is also, incidentally, where a familiar phrase is popularly said to come from. Sick and wounded men were rowed up Haslar Creek to be landed at the hospital steps, and to be sent up the creek was to be in a bad way. Word origins of that kind are very rarely provable and this one should be treated as the local explanation rather than the established one, but it is the right sort of story for the place.

A Genuine Pioneer of Naval Medicine, With One Common Misconception

Haslar's most celebrated association is with James Lind, often called the father of naval medicine, who served as physician there from 1758 until 1785.

It is worth correcting a detail that is very commonly muddled in popular accounts: Lind's famous controlled trial into treating scurvy with citrus fruit took place in 1747 aboard HMS Salisbury, well before he ever joined Haslar, with his resulting treatise published in 1753, the same year the hospital itself opened.

His subsequent decades at Haslar were spent applying and championing that earlier work rather than conducting the original trial there, a distinction well worth making rather than repeating the more romantic but inaccurate version of events. The hospital's contribution to psychiatric care is less widely known but significant.

What Lind actually did at Haslar is worth setting out, because correcting the scurvy story can leave the impression that his twenty-seven years there were an anticlimax. They were not.

His achievement in the Salisbury trial of 1747 was not really the discovery that citrus cures scurvy, which had been noticed before and forgotten before. It was the method. He took twelve sick men, kept them on identical diets, divided them into six pairs and gave each pair a different treatment. That is a controlled comparative trial, and it is routinely cited as one of the first ever conducted.

At Haslar he had two thousand patients to observe rather than twelve, and he spent his time there arguing for the things that actually killed sailors: clean water, ventilation between decks, delousing and fresh clothing on joining a ship, and the isolation of men arriving with fever. He was pushing shipboard hygiene half a century before anybody understood why it worked.

A dedicated Haslar Naval Lunatic Asylum was established there in 1818, one of the very few institutions in Britain dedicated specifically to naval personnel, and under the direction of Dr James Anderson between 1842 and 1853 it adopted a strikingly progressive approach for its era, abolishing the use of chains and barred windows in favour of music, dancing and supervised boating trips, an early and truly humane example of what became known as moral treatment.

It is worth appreciating how unusual that was in the 1840s. The standard treatment of the insane in Britain at the time still involved restraint as a matter of routine, and public asylums were places most families would do a great deal to keep a relative out of.

Anderson took the chains off and replaced them with music, dancing and supervised boating on the creek, which for men who had spent their working lives at sea was a considerably better idea than it sounds. What he was treating, in the language of the time, was largely what would now be recognised as the after-effects of prolonged combat, head injury, alcoholism and chronic disease, in a population with no other source of care at all.

Two and a Half Centuries of Service

Haslar treated enormous numbers of casualties across the Napoleonic Wars and the Crimean War, and continued that role through the twentieth century's two world wars, establishing what is credited as the country's first blood bank and treating casualties from the Normandy landings during the Second World War, when the hospital's own library and museum were destroyed by incendiary bombs.

The blood bank deserves more than a clause. Establishing the country's first one in the 1940s put Haslar at the front of a change that saved an enormous number of lives, because a stored, typed, transfusable supply of blood is the difference between a survivable wound and a fatal one. Before it existed, a transfusion meant finding a compatible donor, in the building, in time, which very often meant not at all.

It is worth being honest about the limits of what can be confidently verified here, since some popularly repeated claims about the hospital, including a supposed tunnel connecting it beneath the water to HMS Dolphin at Fort Blockhouse, and its precise role in treating Falklands War casualties in 1982, could not be confirmed with confidence and should be treated as unverified rather than stated as settled fact, alongside the various ghost stories that understandably attach themselves to any institution this old, which belong firmly in the realm of local folklore rather than history.

The tunnel story in particular is worth a word, because it is repeated everywhere in Gosport. The claim is that a tunnel runs under the water from Haslar to Fort Blockhouse, the site that later became HMS Dolphin. Nothing in the sources consulted supports it, and it is the kind of story that attaches itself to any large old institution with cellars.

That is not to say it is impossible, and Gosport genuinely is riddled with military earthworks, magazines and tunnels of various dates. It is to say that repeating it as fact would be doing exactly what the Lind story does, which is to pass on a good tale because it is a good tale.

From Military Hospital to Waterfront Housing

As the last remaining military hospital in the United Kingdom, Haslar's closure had been signalled as early as 1998, with the Ministry of Defence formally withdrawing in March 2007 and all remaining medical facilities finally closing in 2009.

Haslar was the last of a whole system. The Royal Navy, the Army and the Royal Air Force each ran their own hospitals for most of the twentieth century, on the reasoning that service medicine is a distinct discipline and that a serviceman is better treated by people who understand the job. All of them closed. Haslar, which had opened before the American Revolution, was the last one left, and its closure ended two and a half centuries of the Royal Navy running its own hospital.

It also completed the emptying out of Gosport, which lost HMS St Vincent in 1969, HMS Dolphin in 1998 and Haslar in 2009, across the water from HMNB Portsmouth, which is still working.

The site was later sold to developers, and a 2010 archaeological survey ahead of redevelopment uncovered the remains of roughly 7,785 individuals in unmarked graves in and around the grounds, a striking and sobering reminder of just how many people passed through the hospital's care over two and a half centuries.

One thing should be said about those graves, because the number invites the wrong conclusion. The overwhelming majority of the men buried at Haslar were not killed by the enemy. They were killed by typhus, dysentery, tuberculosis, smallpox, yellow fever and scurvy.

For most of the age of sail, disease killed British sailors at many times the rate that battle did, and that is the whole reason a hospital of this size existed at Gosport at all. Nobody builds two thousand beds for wounds. They built them for fever, and for most of the hospital's first century the beds were full whether or not there was a war on.

Seven thousand seven hundred and eighty-five people in unmarked ground is the cost of that, and it is the reason Lind spent his life at Haslar arguing about drinking water and clean shirts rather than about surgery.

Following a substantial redevelopment, the site reopened in 2020 as Royal Haslar, a waterfront residential development, though the historic eighteenth century quadrangle and St Luke's Chapel, complete with its hour-striking 1762 clock, remain preserved and Grade II star listed, a permanent physical reminder of the scale of what was once built here purely to mend the Royal Navy's sick and wounded.