University Hospital Lewisham
NHS Hospital in Lewisham, London
University Hospital Lewisham (formerly known as Lewisham Hospital) is a teaching hospital run by Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust and serving the London Borough of Lewisham. It is now affiliated with King's College London and forms part of the King's Health Partners academic health science centre. It is situated on Lewisham High Street between Lewisham and Catford.
History
Early history
The site of the current hospital was originally a workhouse, following the bequest of a house on Rushey Green to Lewisham Parish for the relief of the poor in 1612. When the Lewisham workhouse became overcrowded, a new workhouse building was erected in 1817. The Lewisham Poor Law Union was formed in 1836, and the workhouse was enlarged. This improvement included the building of cholera wards behind the workhouse building.
A report in The Lancet in 1865 showed that the workhouse was essentially functioning as a hospital at that time: "Sick, infirm, and able-bodied – so called at least, but we saw none in the entire house – were placed in close approximation". At that time there were seven "sick wards", with 72 beds, and four "infection wards" with 22 beds. Land to the north of the workhouse was used to construct a separate infirmary from 1892, and this was formally opened in 1894.
“University Hospital Lewisham” enters the record as nHS Hospital in Lewisham, London. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what University, Hospital and Lewisham can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q14956783. Authority coordinates are 51.453, -0.017. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1612, 1817, 1836 and 1865.
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This entry incorporates text from “University Hospital Lewisham” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.