We are partial to a savoury cracker made in Finland and marketed as Finn Crisp. These thin, rectangular sourdough rye crackers used to be easily available at the Waitrose supermarkets near where we live, but of late, they have disappeared from the shelves. We have rung other branches of this chain of stores, but none of them stock Finn Crisp anymore. After a search on the Internet, we discovered a shop on Walworth Road in Walworth, a district that neighbours south London’s Camberwell. The store keeps Finn Crisp. On a rainy day, we took a bus that went south of Elephant and Castle, and disembarked near the shop. The bus stop is outside a building, which I had never seen before and it intrigued me.
The mainly brick building houses the Walworth Clinic. Its architecture has elements typical of the Art Deco style that was in fashion in the 1920s to 1940s. Above the main entrance on Walworth Road, there is a rectangular inscribed, stone plaque on which the following was carved:
“The Health of The People is the Highest Law.”
Above this, but closer to the top of the building, I spotted a date: 1937. And above this, there is a stone sculpture depicting a buxom woman holding a staff around which a snake was intertwined – a rod of Aesculapius. At her feet, three children are depicted – two seated girls and a standing boy.
The building stands on the corner of Walworth Road and Larcom Street, from which there are two more entrances to the building.
There is much information about this building on the historicengland website ( https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1393674?section=official-list-entry ), from which I have quoted the following:
“The former Public Health Centre at Southwark was one of a series of pioneering health centres built at the end of the 1930s, in advance of the 1946 National Health Services Act which made their construction a duty of health authorities. Its foundation stone was laid on 11 July 1936 and the building opened on 25 September 1937.
The new building brought all the borough’s health services under one roof and included a solarium for exposing children to artificial sunlight, a TB clinic, X-ray department, maternity and child welfare centre, dentist clinic, … and the Public Analyst, the latter complete with chemical and bacterial laboratory for testing foodstuffs. There was also a special clinic ‘for women from 45 years of age who are subject to illness and disease peculiar to this age group’. With the opening of the health centre, Southwark became, ‘the first borough to have the whole of its health services in one building’, it was claimed by the Borough Medical Officer …”
The building was designed by the Borough Engineer, Percy Smart, about whom there seems to be little available information on the Internet. In contrast, the words on the front of the building are those of a well-known classical author, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC). They are taken from his “De Legibus” (‘On the laws’). The original words which were translated and placed on the clinic were in Latin: “Salus populi suprema est lex.”
Near to this clinic, we bought the Finn Crisp crackers for which we were yearning.
As is often the case when we set out on excursions with a mundane aim, we not only achieve our aim but, as exemplified by the clinic, we discover things we had never come across before.
