The Addington Children’s Hospital on Durban’s beachfront opened in 1931 and is said to have been the first children’s hospital on the African continent. The initial cost of £44,000 was supplemented by the people of Durban who donated generously. Plaques can still be seen in the hospital naming those who donated towrds its construction.

For almost fifty years it served children of all races, but in the early 1980s, at the height of the Apartheid, it was closed. Sadly, this architecturally important building was allowed to deteriorate over the next quarter of a century.

I visited the hospital in 2009 – there were some people living in a section of the building – to make these photographs. In around 2010 work began on the restoration of the hospital.