The hospice as a sacred place

The hospice as a sacred place
The New Statesman; by Ken Worpole; 6/21/24
[UK] The hospice building retains a special place in the modern imagination, a new iteration of Larkin’s “serious building on serious earth”. ... The symbolic power of the hospice building was demonstrated in 2014, when 500 people attended a meeting protesting the proposed closure of Pilgrims Hospice in Canterbury. “It’s only bricks and mortar,” advocates of closure argued, suggesting that hospice care could be provided just as meaningfully at home. John Harries, resident-researcher at St Christopher’s, followed the saga closely. The arguments against closure, he saw, came from families of those who had died within hospice walls, and for whom the building had “achieved the status of a sacred place”: for them, “closure was seen as an act of desecration”. For Harries, “Care is an invisible abstraction, but for many it is symbolised and made concrete by the building.”
Publisher's Note: A bit of hospice history is woven into this interesting piece.