The last two babies ever to be born at St John's Hospital in Chelmsford have been delivered on the day its maternity unit moves to Broomfield Hospital.Yet-to-be named 'infant Newby' was the final arrival by emergency caesarean at 1048 GMT on Thursday, 18 November.BabyLP
was the last to be delivered naturally at 0535 GMT, weighing in at 7lb 4oz.
The unit has now relocated to the new £148m Private Finance Initiative (PFI)funded £148m wing at Broomfield.Tens of thousands of children have been born at St John's maternity ward since it opened in 1926.In recent years the hospital, located within the former work house in Chelmsford,has seen around 4700 births per year.
After an early start we rolled up outside our target and found our way past the initial perimeter fence with no issues at all. Looking around we started to fear that this would be a very short explore, it appeared the explore was going to be shorter still when we clumsily stumbled into some localised alarm in one of the outer buildings. After a quick walk to another building to see what would happen it became clear that if there was security on site they were still asleep or not bothered about checking things out.
We skirted the building being more careful about the possibility of alarms and eventually found a way into the more modern wings.
After exhausting all photo opportunities of interest in the building we left carefully through our entry point and moved on to look for access to the more central buildings. Again access was found and due to the sheer size of the building we paired up and went in opposite directions. My partner in exploring eagerly trying to sniff out a mortuary or something similar for his slab shot. Our trip through this building was cut short when we all but walked into the onsite security office.
Discretion being the better part of valour we backed up and contacted "team 2" with our new find and as a group felt we had seen enough to consider calling it a day and moving on to another site.

Enough of the waffle here are some of the pictures:





























Sadly one patient was beyond help and perished onsite...there must have been such a rush to leave he was just left where he fell.....



Thanks for looking.

A final note of thanks to Nelly, Tstranger and Skeleton Key for a top day.