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The Fitzrovia Chapel is a miniature cathedral in the heart of London – a tiny vault of marble, stained glass and gold conceived on the most human of scales. Old photographs show congregations of barely more than 50. It is possible to walk from one end to the other in fewer than a dozen steps, but along the way are glimmering mosaics, glowing stars and some of the most moving words I have ever read in a church.
This chapel, where King Charles recorded his recent Christmas message, is all that remains of the old Middlesex hospital in the heart of London. A neo-gothic building of dark red brick, it once nestled inside this venerable teaching hospital, founded in 1745. Now it stands alone, and fully visible, dwarfed instead by the high-rise apartments and luxury shops of the Pearson Square complex that replaced the Middlesex after it closed in 2005.
The symbolic nature of this transition will not be lost on anyone treated in that hospital – I was one – or anyone desperate for hospital treatment right now. The Middlesex was materially dilapidated, but wholehearted in compassion. Some of London’s poorest people were cared for in its peeling wards. Current rental for an eighth-floor apartment in Pearson Square is an unthinkable £104,000 a year. Only consider that the Middlesex hospital was paid for entirely by philanthropic subscription.
The Middlesex believed that its patients deserved high art, not the infantile schlock inflicted on sick people now. When you went through the front doors on Mortimer Street, Frederick Cayley Robinson’s four Acts of Mercy (1916-20) were there to meet you. Pale and serene, influenced by Piero della Francesca, these paintings of orphans and patients, nurses and doctors were gently reassuring. (They’re now in the Wellcome Collection.) But above all, there was the chapel, ill-lit and somewhat sepulchral in the 90s, when I was there, but now exquisitely restored. Every one of its many different colours of marble glows with warmth, and its cobalt and gold inscriptions around transept and font seem to hang in the illuminated air like biblical legends.
It is the dedications to the people who worked there, however, that make the chapel so unique. Lettered on white marble pages, they amount to a book of life and death on the walls. Each person is characterised. The senior surgeons – “gifted, ardent, true”, or “trusted and wise”, or dying there in devoted service. The matrons: much beloved, pioneering, implicitly feared. The young doctor who dies of appendicitis three weeks after his first day.
A typhus epidemic carries off nurse after nurse in the late 19th century; you picture them bravely caring for their patients, like the nurses who died during Covid. Diphtheria follows. Then a generation of young doctors is slaughtered in the first world war. The chapel may be minute but it contains such a vast history of society and medicine, of persistence and courage. Go there and you will learn of the first female neurosurgeon in Britain, Diana Beck, or the nurse who saved the hospital from exploding when an oxygen cylinder went up in flames in the main operating theatre. For this, Dorothy Louise Thomas won the Empire Gallantry Medal in 1934.
The chapel has held several exhibitions since reopening in 2017. Generally chosen for their historical affinity, they have included Lee Miller’s portraits of nurses and Gideon Mendel’s photographs of patients on London’s first Aids wards, at the Middlesex. The new show is an anthology of works from the Roberts Institute of Art, a private foundation run, incidentally, by a Scottish property developer who often displays his collection for free.
In Attendance is a fine title for more than medical reasons. How to pay attention in a world of millisecond distractions has answers in art from Piero to Dutch still life onwards. But here the work is all contemporary; and one on-screen exhibit, by Eve Sussman, slows down a dramatised moment from Velázquez’s Las Meninas so that the pouring of a glass takes a full 14 minutes.
Everything here is affected by the context, moreover, so that one feels the art connect with bodies and mortality in some fundamental way. So a semi-abstract landscape by the great Lebanese-American painter-poet Etel Adnan, of undulating hills beneath a blue sky, seems at the same time to show two slumbering figures. And Ghanaian-born Emmanuel Awuni’s head of glass and glazed clay, regal and transparent in equal measure, appears to lie like a sleeping patient on a bed of twinkling blue foam.
Rachel Kneebone’s Trilogy consists of three white porcelain cornucopias of what look, at a distance, like flora and fauna with Grinling Gibbons overtones. Up close, they turn out to be all tiny knees and thighs and toes, writhing and twisting in curlicued pile-ups. Kneebone’s trademark white porcelain takes on a new significance in this chapel, cracked and fissured and curiously moulded, suddenly seeming more deeply related to orthopaedics, plaster casts and brittle bones.
I wish Berlinde de Bruyckere’s poor dead horse was not sacrificed on art’s altar, its long legs spilling over the side of a bare wooden table, real skin stuffed with epoxy resin. The Belgian artist is all lugubrious melodrama. But Phyllida Barlow’s winged Sputnik of shattered building materials, which seems to recollect both the recent demolition and local second world war bombs, is powerfully dynamic, laid out beneath the beautiful christening font.
Best of all is Paula Rego’s drawing of St Mary of Egypt, in dark and hardwon pencil. Mary sits with her knees sprawled, head raised in wild dreams, long hair cascading down almost to her lap. Beneath her, a desert lion opens its ferocious mouth. This ancient saint lives in the present – she might almost be a woman on a lion-skin rug – but also in the past. In Rego’s tremendously original vision, she becomes at once real and a legend.
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In Attendance: Paying Attention in a Fragile World is at the Fitzrovia Chapel, London, until 9 February; daily 11am-6pm (closed Mondays), Sunday 12-5pm; free admission
