ABSTRACT
Praising the new naval hospital at Greenwich in 1728, the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor declared that such institutions were one of the necessary means of ‘rectifying the irregular and ill management of the police of great cities’.1 By that he meant that hospitals were both a testimony to enlightened civic policies and a mechanism for instituting and preserving social order. They had admirably fulfilled both functions in Louis XIV’s Paris; now they might do the same in Georgian London. Aspirations of this kind were by no means new in London, however. For two centuries before 1728, hospitals had been visualised as institutions which might not only express charitable instincts, relieve the poor, and protect public health, but in doing all those things bring about civic regulation and civic regeneration.
