Jigsaw of buildings.
Maitland Hospital viewed from the northern end of the Long Bridge, 2018.
(Peter Smith)
By 2020, the Maitland Hospital had expanded to include a wide variety of health services and to cater for an ever-growing population. To accommodate this, new buildings were constructed throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. They were fitted into spaces and linked to existing buildings on the hospital site. The architectural styles and designs of individual buildings became a bit lost, and the hospital became very much a jigsaw of structures. The purpose was to ensure a functioning, efficient and safe hospital.
Plans and aerial views highlight the ways in which buildings have been fitted together. A timeline plots the expansion of buildings on the site.
Maitland Hospital redevelopment plan showing buildings to be demolished and planned new buildings, 1986/1987.
(Newcastle Region Library)
Google view of the site.
Plan of the Maitland Hospital, c2018.
(with thanks to Bruce Pritchard)
1849: Block K - ‘a conspicuous object’ - a two storey building with verandahs and overlooking the Mount Pleasant flood plain
1859: ‘Dead house’ (since demolished)
1891: Separate infectious diseases ward (replaced in 1916)
1905: Block J - ‘handsome and substantial’
1916: Block L - new infectious diseases ward.
1928 to 1938: nurses’ residence, built in stages. (on Block A site, demolished in 1993)
1933: Block N (part) - mortuary.
1933 to 1939: Block D - private wards and a sunken garden.
1934: Block H - kitchen block with nurses’ dining room, domestic quarters, laundry and boiler room.
1938: Block N (part) - pathology.
1942-1947: Block I - outpatients ward and other facilities, new entrance.
1950s: Mt Pleasant St cottage acquired.
1960: Block F - R.L. Williams nurses’ residence.
1968: Block G - ‘Melbee’ cottage acquired and adapted.
1976: Block M - workshops.
1978: Block E - Robert Brown Wing.
1990s: Blocks B and C.
2010: Block A - new emergency.
2022: New hospital at Metford.
Views of buildings on the Maitland Hospital site, 2019 and 2020.
(Janis Wilton)
Significance
The Maitland Hospital complex is significant because:
It is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, public hospital in regional New South Wales to operate from the one site for over 170 years. As such the structures on the site and the history of the site provide insights into the history of public health services in the Maitland district as well as New South Wales more broadly including changing styles in hospital architecture.
It is an iconic public institution in the locality that, for the full length of its history, has engaged members of the local community as committee members, staff, volunteers, and patients and has attracted support from the local community in fundraising campaigns. In this it is also representative of public hospitals throughout regional New South Wales that are very much a part of, and dependent on, their local communities while also providing medical services to those communities.
It has an overt association with a number of prominent local, colonial and state identities whose names are inscribed on plaques and whose contributions are memorialised in a variety of other ways.
It is located on the only hill overlooking the flood plain that surrounds the Maitland city centre. At the time of the 1849 opening of the earliest building it was commended as ‘a conspicuous object’ and ‘one of the chief architectural ornaments of the town’ and, well into the twentieth century, attracted comments about its location and architectural features.