Place Name
Laid out on the 19-acre site of the former Park Fever Hospital which later became Hither Green Hospital. It was opened in 1897 by the Prince of Wales as the last of five new fever hospitals around the metropolis following a shortage of beds during an epidemic of scarlet fever that ran from 1892 to 1893. At the time it was completed it was the largest fever hospital in England with 548 beds and a staff of 3000, and had cost £280,000 to build. For a short while it became Park Hospital for Children and at the start of the First World War it was used as a refugee centre. Shortly after the creation of the NHS it became Hither Green Hospital but was closed in 1997 with its remaining services transferred to Lewisham Hospital. Bellway Homes bought the site shortly afterwards and it is now a £28m housing complex containing 442 homes. The names of the streets were controversial. Bellway Homes had originally wanted to give roads and buildings at Meridian South (the Greenwich meridian line runs through the estate), names such as Planet Road, Comet Close and Asteroid Lodge. But after an outcry from local residents in 2003 who claimed the development sounded “cold, impersonal, metallic and more suited to a nightmare vision of a 25th-century Gotham City” the names were changed.
