Erz

Glasgow’s dear green places have never felt so important. We have been consulting this week with hospital communities in several contexts. 

A nurse described 15 weeks in ICU as a patient and a further 15 weeks as the solitary inhabitant of a single room on a COVID recovery ward, with no visitors and a view of cut grass and concrete. She said the worst part was as she got better and realised how lonely and trapped she was. Nurses worry most about the patients who cannot see their families and how this effects their chances of survival. The word “claustrophobia” cropped up throughout every dialogue. We spoke to a doctor who selflessly wants to build a green commemoration for the families of those who survived COVID, and those who did not survive the last eighteen months. We spoke to bereaved family members who crave a safe outdoor place to meet people who have had the same losses. Stories coming out of the hospital communities right now tell of kindness, camaraderie, loneliness and also of the need to be able to get outside for sanctuary and solace.

I am working on a project called HALO Garden where we want to create small accessible garden rooms for every health building in the country so that staff can get outside for rest and respite, and patients can be wheeled out to recover in the sunlight and safely see their children whatever illness they have – and those trapped inside can have the small luxury of a vibrant view. But really, should this be a luxury?

We are, separately, reviewing the hundred years of organic decisions that have reduced three different Victorian city hospitals in Scotland to an illegible maze of carparks and random buildings which serve no-one well. Each started life as edge of town Victorian asylums, those notorious tropes of horror films and gothic novels – I especially remember a teenage David Tennant leaping off the tower at Gartloch Hospital in Taking Over the Asylum. In fact, a different story emerges within our research - in Victorian Scotland, horticultural therapies were integrated into both the care given and the generous landscape designs at Gartloch, Gartnavel, the Royal Alexandra, Lennox Castle, and even the landlocked Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, which started life as Govan Poorhouse. Hints of these spaces remain as much-loved mature trees, ponds and walled gardens, hidden away between aerial corridors, parking zones and back of house storage yards.

Green recovery for the NHS will include re-embracing this long ignored asset as we all re-evaluate the role of the outdoors in keeping us not only physically healthy, but safely and - essentially - connected to other people: the need for conviviality as a core goal for landscape again becomes clear.