IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Peregrine Place, BOURNE, PE10 0FW

Bourne Hospital opened in 1915 as an isolation unit for patients suffering from infectious diseases and over the years expanded to become a cottage hospital providing a much needed medical amenity for the town and district. By 1965, it was being run as a medical and surgical unit with 53 beds and fully staffed by medical personnel with a chest X-ray unit and clinics specialising in the eyes, orthopaedics, remedial and relaxation therapy and child welfare. The hospital closed in 1998 and was demolished five years later to make way for new housing. See Image

The exit from the Ambulance Station into the housing estate

The town lost its hospital in 1998 despite widespread public protest and the four-acre site was subsequently sold for residential development and has since been filled with more than 70 new homes while the newly created streets have been given names with medical connections from the past.

This development off South Road is so new that at the moment it does not appear on the Ordnance Survey or on Google Maps. The building in the centre is a care home whilst new housing is to the left and right. Doubtless other buildings will follow.

The present ambulance station was opened on a site at the corner of the Bourne Hospital complex in South Road in 1980 following a disastrous fire which wrecked the previous headquarters in Queen’s Road. The hospital has now closed and the buildings demolished and replaced by a housing estate but the ambulance station remains although financial restraints within the East Midlands Ambulance Service make its future uncertain.

There used to be an ambulance garage at the fire station, but it was destroyed in a terrible fatal fire. The replacement was built here, which at the time was in the grounds of the isolation hospital. That facility was torn away from us by NHS management, and in recent years the merger of the Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire ambulance trusts nearly cost us the ambulance station too. But we need it, and much agitation saved the facility. The ambulance station is now tucked away in a housing estate built where the hospital once stood.

Bourne Hospital closed in 1998 after a valiant public campaign to keep it open including a petition signed by 8,000 people and was demolished in the summer of 2003 to make way for new homes which have since been built on the four acre site. The hospital opened in 1915 as an isolation unit for patients with infectious diseases and expanded to become a cottage hospital providing a much needed medical amenity for the town and district but now it has gone, patients are sent to Peterborough, 17 miles away.

Built by church volunteers over a single weekend in 2004, this is the newest church in Bourne.