The long overlooked staircase by Hogarth at St Bartholomew’s Hospital has been cleaned and restored in a £9.5 million scheme. It is now open to the public, the management says, for the first time since the 1730s, although when I lived nearby in the 2000s, I used to slip in to look at it sometimes. No one seemed to mind. Murals are of course the original site-specific artworks, and you have to enter a working hospital to see this one. Literally: turn right for the clap clinic, turn left for the Hogarth mural.

Turn right for the clap clinic, turn left for the Hogarth mural

You might pass a small group of patients smoking outside in the James Gibbs quadrangle; I remember seeing people who were visibly sick, in wheelchairs or on ventilators, puffing away. Metres from them, you push open a heavy wooden door, and there, in what used to be sepulchral gloom, were Hogarth’s largest paintings.

The mural, finished in 1736, is a sumptuous double-decker. You can stand on the upper landing and read it like the spread pages of a book (see below). Before cleaning, it was murky. The ravaged 18th-century faces of the lame, the ‘blind, halt and withered’ loomed out of an indistinct background, uncleaned since 1972. The woman with the ‘green sickness’ (anaemia) was prominent but the rest occluded, the curtains of the grand staircase drawn against further sun damage. The healing ‘Pool........

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