French Hospital (La Providence)

French Hospital (La Providence)
French Hospital (La Providence), Rochester, Kent. Main elevation Photograph by Tim Rawle
Location	41 La Providence, Rochester, Kent, United Kingdom
Coordinates	51°23′18″N 0°30′18″E / 51.3884°N 0.5051°E / 51.3884; 0.5051Coordinates: 51°23′18″N 0°30′18″E / 51.3884°N 0.5051°E / 51.3884; 0.5051
Founded	1718
Listed Building – Grade II
Designated	19 February 1970
Reference no.	173065

The French Hospital was founded in 1718 in Finsbury on behalf of poor French Protestants and their descendants residing in Great Britain. In the 1860s it moved into the spectacular purpose-built hospital designed by Robert Lewis Roumieu in Victoria Park, Hackney, and then in the 1940s moved out of London to Compton's Lea, Horsham, West Sussex. Since 1959 it has been located in Rochester, Kent and today provides almshouse accommodation for Huguenot descendants.

Affectionately known as La Providence from as early as the 1720s, the hospital for poor French Protestants and their descendants was one of the earliest foundations to improve the welfare of London’s needy immigrants, and one of the first in Britain to provide sympathetic care for the mentally ill.

In his will proved on 2 December 1708, Jacques de Gastigny, who had been Master of the Hounds to King William III, left £1,000 to improve the pest-house to the north of Old Street in the parish of St Giles without Cripplegate and provide an annual revenue which "shall be employed to ffurnish Bedds, Linnen and Cloths and other necessities of the said poor ffrench Protestants who shall be in the said place". This set in train the establishment of the French Hospital that was to be a forerunner of health and welfare institutions set up in England in the eighteenth century.

Philippe Ménard, executor of Jacques de Gastigny's estate, served as secretary for an appeal to supplement the bequest. The appeal was so successful that the idea grew not merely to build an extension to the Cripplegate pest-house but to build a brand new hospital. The French Hospital was incorporated under the Great Seal by letters patent dated 24 July 1718. The corporation chose as its own seal an image of Elijah being fed by the ravens (1 King's 17:6), with the motto Dominus providebit ("The Lord will provide"). An inventory of the contents of the hospital from 1742 survives.

By the early nineteenth century, the number of inmates of the hospital had fallen and the buildings in Finsbury were in urgent need of restoration. Rather than rebuilding the hospital on its Bath Street site, it was decided to find a new London location.

When the new hospital in Hackney opened in 1865 the Builder claimed it had been modelled on the Château de Chambord. The architect, Robert Lewis Roumieu, who had generously waived his fee for his drawings, was for a while the hospital's treasurer. Besides being a hospital for its sixty inmates, with state-of-the-art equipment, it also consolidated a revival of interest in Huguenot history and achievement and became a repository for Huguenot records and items with a Huguenot tradition.