Private care home: rust-stained extended old houses are a reversion to the past

Another of my occasional pictures of facilities for older people, in this case, a care home in south Sutton.

It is typical of many private care homes both in its location and in the building. South Sutton is the formerly classy area of this suburb, on the southern border of London, merging into Surrey stockbroker belt. Some of this area still contains giant houses worth from a half mill to £2m or so, with extensive grounds. When we moved here ten years ago, an estate agent looked us over and said: 'Well, you'll be wanting to look in south Sutton, won't you?'

But nearer to the town centre, the big Edwardian houses are multi-occupied, or knocked down and replaced by larger blocks of flats, or simply converted into flats or, the concern of this blog, translated into care homes.

Here is an unprepossessing example, with the off-putting rust stains on the outside cladding and the bizarre design presumably cramming more rooms into the site than the big old house that previously occupied it. Looking at the side of it, it seems to have been extended both front and back. Domestic scale and Edwardian style are lost.

Because of its building, this is not a care home that can make nostalgic claims of connection with leisurely Edwardian gentility, or of convenient modernity. Local authorities, when they ran residential care, gave up the inconvenient and mobility-inhibiting conversions of large gentlemen's residences and went for newbuild on grounds of efficient service provision and convenience and independence for residents. A lot of the large-house converted private sector care homes are an uninspiring reversion to the past.