leybourne grange | reporters, residents and removers
11|02|06

The grounds in February were bleak and cold; there was little colour, and little light. The car continued to buzz us, but we managed to evade it, more by luck than design, as we were hardly being cautious.

Whilst walking past more villas, we then spotted the biggest building we’d yet seen.





The nurse’s home was probably the biggest I’d ever seen. It style was of a 1930s block house; but more like one of the villas on steroids. From the human proportions of the other buildings on the site, this made no compromises, stretching across the field of view with elongated and stretched lines. It almost hinted at the brutal architectural movement to come.





It had obviously been derelict for a while, given the size of this tree growing out of the wall.





Given it’s large size, there was something elegant about this building. The stone mullioned front entrance, the smaller, more human porch, the roof windows; these all conspired to soften its appearance, but it did still feel like a building that had simply grown too large.







I wanted to learn more and was itching to get inside. Was it just a nurse’s home or did it have some other function? Sadly, no-one else wanted to join me. So, I shrugged and walked on; this trip was simply becoming a strict recce and little else.