Burton Road Hospital
Burton Road Hospital was a National Health Service hospital situated in Dudley, West Midlands, England.
It originally existed within the Sedgley Urban district until that became part of Dudley in 1966. However, when the site was first developed in 1859 it was known as Dudley Union Workhouse.[1] Unlike most of the old Sedgley urban district, however, the land on which Burton Road stood became part of the Dudley DY1 post code district rather than Sedgley DY3.[2]
The workhouse closed around the turn of the 20th century and were converted into a hospital which incorporated several new buildings, including the Rosemary Ednam Maternity Home that opened in 1926. The maternity home remained open until May 1988 when all of the borough's maternity services were relocated to a new £6million unit at Wordsley Hospital.
A donation by the Rotary Club enabled Burton Road Hospital to receive the country's first mobile cardiac unit in 1971.
The hospital closed in December 1993 on the relocation of its services to Russells Hall Hospital and Bushey Fields Hospital, and demolition took place a year later. The former maternity home, which had been empty for six years, was also demolished at this time.
During the later years of its existence, the hospital mainly housed services for elderly patients as well of those with mental illnesses.
The main road entrance to the hospital was the scene of a murder in the early hours of Christmas Day 1988, when 27-year-old Upper Gornal man Gary Batham was fatally stabbed on his way home from a town centre nightclub. In September 1989, 18-year-old Dudley man Trevor Nettleford was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder, and his accomplice Carlos Edwards was sentenced to six months imprisonment for manslaughter.
A new ambulance station had opened on part of the hospital site in 1986, and a new fire station was opened on another part of the site in 1999.
However, the bulk of the hospital site was redeveloped for upmarket private housing in the mid to late 1990s - the developments being known as Earls Keep and Bishops Lodge.