Building    From 1835  To 1954

Receiving House

Categories: Medicine, Tragedy

In 1774 a group of London doctors, concerned at the number of people who were mistakenly being given up for dead, wanted to promote new techniques of resuscitation. They decided to concentrate on drownings and formed The Institution for Affording Immediate Relief to Persons Apparently Dead from Drowning, on 18 April 1774 at the Chapter Coffee House, St Pauls Churchyard. It quickly became The Humane Society and in 1787 with George III’s patronage it became the Royal Humane Society.

The Society introduced what we might nowadays call life-guards at sites popular with bathers or ice-skaters (who mostly could not swim). Once the guard spotted a drowning person he would go out in a boat, fish the drowner out the water and use the doctors’ techniques to restore life. The techniques involved hot water, baths and beds so a building was required and a number of these were established in the Westminster area near popular water sites.

At the Serpentine an old farmhouse was used at first, on land given by the King. In 1835 this was replaced, on the same site, with a properly equipped Receiving House, designed by J. B. Bunning (who also designed the Copenhagen Park clock tower). This was damaged by a bomb in WW2 and demolished in 1954.

All the information above comes from the picture source, the Royal Humane Society and Pure and Constant which also has a drawing and a plan of the building. That website credits “Saved from a Watery Grave” by Diana Coke, published by the Royal Humane Society (2000).

The Receiving House is the building to the left in the picture.

This section lists the memorials where the subject on this page is commemorated:
Receiving House

Commemorated ati

Receiving House

The 1969 film, A Touch of Love, shows a drinking fountain of this style in a ...

Read More

Other Subjects

Keith Clifford Hall

Keith Clifford Hall

Optician.  Born Cambridge.  Aged 17 apprenticed to an optician.  Qualified with night-school study and began fitting contact lenses in 1934.   Became a world specialist and published an early text ...

Person, Medicine

1 memorial
League of the Royal Free Hospital Nurses

League of the Royal Free Hospital Nurses

We've put the two leagues together: League of the Royal Free Hospital Nurses & Hampstead General Hospital Nurses League, since, when the NHS merged the two hospital together, presumably the Nur...

Group, Medicine

2 memorials
Jean-Paul Marat

Jean-Paul Marat

Physician, political theorist, scientist, radical journalist and politician from the French Revolution. Murdered in his bath by Charlotte Corday.

Person, Journalism / Publishing, Medicine, Nationalism, Politics & Administration, France, Switzerland

1 memorial
Medical College of St Bartholomew's Hospital

Medical College of St Bartholomew's Hospital

From AIM: "Medical students at St Bartholomew's Hospital are first recorded in 1662. The School and the Hospital were formally separated in 1921, when the School was incorporated with a new title,...

Building, Education, Medicine

1 memorial