Sometimes the most ordinary events can open a door into the past.
Recently we went to our local health centre in Fornoli to sort out a problem with my left foot. There is a strange pain around my ankle — almost as if someone had kicked it — although, of course, that never happened. Something is clearly wrong, and so I was given an impegnativa, the Italian medical request, for an X-ray.
This simple medical appointment suddenly brought back memories of other X-ray departments I have known throughout my life, especially those in England.
It was another hot, humid night, and sleep was difficult. As often happens when I cannot sleep, I came downstairs and began looking through old photographs. Among them I found something that immediately caught my attention: pictures from a visit we made to one of the most extraordinary medical buildings I have ever encountered — the underground X-ray department at Bexley, in south-east London.

The photographs were taken with an early Kodak EZ200 digital camera one of the first to be easily affordable to the general public. With a resolution of only 640 × 480 pixels (about 0.3 megapixels) and no screen for viewing images, it produced soft, slightly blurred photographs typical of the first digital era. There was no memory card and certainly no smartphones features capable of taking thousands of photographs instantly. You just pressed the button and hoped for the best.
Afterwards, the photographs had to be transferred to a computer — in those days always a desktop machine — using the early forms of USB digital connection. Looking back, it almost seems like another technological age.
The original photographs were understandably not of acceptable quality. However, using modern digital technology, I have been able to improve them, bringing back more detail and clarity from those old images. In doing so, I have rediscovered not only the photographs themselves, but also the atmosphere of the remarkable place they recorded.
In 2001 the underground hospital was not a museum or a forgotten relic. It was still a working X-ray department. And that was what made it so extraordinary.
The hospital had originally been built in 1938, during the tense years before the Second World War, as a bomb-proof underground casualty hospital. It was designed as a place where civilians could receive treatment safely beneath the ground if London and the surrounding areas suffered devastating bombing.
After the war, in 1950, the facility was converted into an X-ray department and continued to serve the local community for many decades. Eventually, because of its historical importance, the building was given Grade II listed status.
To enter that hospital was almost like stepping into another world. Patients did not simply walk into a bright, modern radiology suite. They descended underground, into a place created from the fears of another age. The concrete walls, enclosed corridors, artificial lighting and the knowledge that this had once been designed as a refuge from war gave the building a unique atmosphere.

One could almost imagine the uncertainty of the late 1930s: the preparations for a war that had not yet begun, the expectation that ordinary people might one day need protection from the skies above. For patients arriving there over the decades — from the post-war years right through to the beginning of the 21st century — there must have been something mysterious about the experience. An X-ray appointment became a journey beneath the surface, into a hidden part of history.
The medical staff, of course, knew it simply as their workplace and I am told they loved working there. But for patients it must have felt like entering a time capsule.
When we visited we were fortunate enough to see it while it was still alive and functioning as part of everyday healthcare. I have since discovered that this chapter has now ended. In 2024 a new modern digital X-ray suite opened in the main hospital building replacing the underground department. The NHS has expressed the hope that the historic bunker can be preserved and given a new purpose.
One small sadness is that the old X-ray equipment which helped create the atmosphere of a working hospital from another era has probably been removed. Without those machines, some of the feeling of stepping back in time may inevitably be lost. Yet the building itself remains a remarkable survivor.
It is one of the very few surviving examples of an underground civilian wartime hospital in Britain and reminds me of another extraordinary underground medical site we have visited — the enormous German-built underground hospital in Guernsey, constructed during the occupation of the Channel Islands. That was on a much larger scale, but both places tell the same story: the attempt to protect human life in times of conflict.
And yet there is a sad question. If hospitals are protected places under the Geneva convention why build them underground? The answer is that history has shown there is no absolute guarantee that any hospital will be safe during war. We have seen in recent conflicts, including Gaza, that even medical facilities can be caught up in violence despite the protections that should exist.
The underground hospital at Bexley therefore represents far more than an unusual medical building. It is a reminder of the anxieties of the 1930s, the determination of wartime Britain, and the countless ordinary people who passed through those corridors seeking help. Let us hope that this remarkable place survives, because buildings like this do not merely tell us about medicine. They tell us about people.

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