| 1842 Meyer print ROYAL HOSPITAL CHELSEA, LONDON |
Nice view titled Chelsea-Hospital bei London, from steel engraving with fine detail and clear impression, nice hand coloring, approx. image size is 9 x 14 cm. From Meyer's Universum, published by Bibliographic Institute Hildburghausen Germany.
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Royal Hospital Chelsea
The Royal Hospital Chelsea is a retirement home and nursing home for British soldiers who are unfit for further duty due to injury or old age, located in the Chelsea region of central London, now the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. It is a true hospital in the original sense of the word, that is a place where hospitality was provided. There are just over 300 soldiers (310, as of 10 June 2004) resident in the Royal Hospital, referred to as "in-pensioners" (or more colloquially, as Chelsea pensioners).
The grounds of the Royal Hospital have been the site of the annual Chelsea Flower Show since 1913.
History
The Royal Hospital was founded by King Charles II, who issued a Royal Warrant authorising the building of the Hospital on 22 December 1681, in order to make provision for old or injured soldiers. Many of these soldiers, who were no longer fit for service, had been kept on regimental rolls so that they could continue to receive payment, because there was an inadequate provision of pensions for them.
Sir Christopher Wren was commissioned to design and erect the building. His design was based on the Hôpital des Invalides in Paris.
The site for the Hospital was an area of Chelsea which held an incomplete building — "Chelsey College", a theological college founded by James I in 1610. The area had been donated by Charles II to the Royal Society in 1667, but since the Society had been unable to find a suitable use for the site, it was repurchased by the King in February 1682 to provide the site for the Hospital.
Construction took place at a rapid pace and by the time of Charles II's death, in 1685, the main hall and chapel of the Hospital had already been completed. The first patients included those injured at the Battle of Sedgemoor. In 1686, Wren expanded his original design to add two additional quadrangles to the east and west of the central court.
Work was completed in 1692, and the first in-pensioners were admitted in February 1692. By the end of March that year, the full capacity of 476 former soldiers were in residence.
In 1694 a Royal Charter was established for a direct naval equivalent to the Royal Hospital Chelsea. Building began in 1696 on the Greenwich Hospital, and it opened in 1705.
Because of its elevation, from 1796 to 1816 the Royal Hospital Chelsea hosted a station in the shutter telegraph chain which connected the Admiralty in London to its naval ships in Portsmouth.
In 1809, Sir John Soane designed and constructed a new infirmary building, with space for 80 patients, located to the west of the Hospital building on the site of the current National Army Museum. The infirmary was damaged by bombing in the Second World War and later demolished.
The first televised church service in the United Kingdom was broadcast from the hospital Chapel in 1949.
In 2002, the Sovereign's Mace was presented to the hospital — up until then, the hospital had had no colours or distinctive device — the Mace is now carried at all the ceremonial events at the Hospital. In 2009 the hospital was opened to women for the first time.
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