II. The Practice Setting

This suburban area of London was rural a hundred years ago when the surgery opened. A lady of ninety-four remembers going to school across the fields, and a visit to the first doctor in the practice when she swallowed a sixpence.

A vision of the place in the distant past can be conjured up by a detour through the old church path. Standing in the small field which awaits the encroaching graves, with one's back to the railway embankment, a clump of yew trees can be aligned with the grey church walls to obscure the enveloping blockade of bricks and concrete and the noise of traffic. Here stood a country hamlet, with farmland and manor house, the church a staging-post for pilgrims between the cathedrals of Westminster and St Albans.

When the construction of the railway junction brought men in from the provinces, they met and married country girls ‘in service’ at the big middle-class houses on the other side of the borough. They brought up their families in the little streets of terraced houses which gave onto the pavement at the front but had a useful garden at the back. The small scale gave a pleasing air of homeliness, and many were still occupied by inhabitants of long-standing up to the time of their demolition.

Off the main road, on the other side and still standing, are other estates of terraced houses. Along all the streets and roads flows a cavalcade of humanity pushing prams, pulling shopping baskets, preoccupied with the journey to and from work, with the preparation of meals, with their families, their parents, their children, their lovers. Away down the road is the local primary school adding the chants, screams and laughter of the junior playground to the general bustling of the day's business.

The old surgery stood at the end of a terrace on a corner. It was near the parish church and closely associated with the little network of streets, some of which ran between the high road and the railway line. These red brick terraces of identical cottages had two bedroo