The Royal Dental Hospital

The Move to Leicester Square: 1874

Sir Edwin Saunders, dental surgeon to Queen Victoria, the most generous of the early benefactors of the hospital, recognised the potential of the unfashionable Leicester Square, which at this time was still rather a run down neighbourhood.

In 1874, the Hospital and School moved to Numbers 40 and 41. The first of the houses had to be converted from its role as a soup kitchen for the poor, acquiring in addition a handsome new façade that it was hoped might 'lead to more exalted estimation both of the Institution and of the profession which it represents'.

Its growing reputation as a centre of excellence in the world of dentistry was reflected in the formation of the British Dental Association, the trade union of the dental profession in the United Kingdom, at a meeting of the Hospital in October 1879.

The recent move provided some additional space, but clearly not enough, as attendances rose to a record 43,000 in 1886, one correspondent writing that 'if we were crowded at the old rooms in Soho Square, we are crowded even now'. He went on to describe:

'A row of chairs are filled with patients attended by earnest, industrious students…the noisy operations of the extracting room are not hindered by the more quiet work of the anaesthetist, whose patients now inhale the soothing gas undisturbed by the shrieks of adjacent sufferers'.