Weir Maternity Hospital

Corporate body

Weir Maternity Hospital

• Weir Hospital

1911-1977

Opened in Grove Road, Balham in 1911, funded by the will of Benjamin Weir (d.1902). During the First World War, the hospital was taken over by the Kensington Division of the British Red Cross Society, and became the Kensington Red Cross War Hospital, part of the Third London (T.F.) General Hospital, and received patients not only from the military hospital but also directly from the battlefields abroad. It closed as a military hospital in 1919, and re-opened as a general hospital in 1920.

A new maternity hospital, the Wandsworth War Memorial Maternity Home, was built on an adjacent site by the Wandsworth Borough Council in 1931, administered by the Weir Hospital until 1934. The hospital joined the NHS in 1948, and it was combined with the Wandsworth War Memorial Maternity Home. The hospital closed as a general hospital in 1950, and the two hospitals, now known as the Weir Maternity Hospital, re-opened later that year. A premature baby unit was opened in 1951 and a new maternity unit built in the 1960s. The hospital closed in 1977 when maternity units were re-located to district general hospitals.

General hospital; later maternity

Lost Hospitals of London