Plumptre Hospital

Plumptre Hospital was a charity in Nottingham providing almshouse accommodation for 599 years from 1392 to 1991.

This is a very interesting old property in central Nottingham, just down from the National Ice Centre - where we went today to pick up our season tickets for the Nottingham Panthers upcoming Ice Hockey season .

John de Plumptre, Mayor of Nottingham, founded Plumptre Hospital in 1392. It was dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary and supported two priests and "thirteen poor women broken down of age and depressed of poverty". It was endowed with 13 properties around the town.

In 1414 the number of widows was reduced to seven and he gave the hospital his house, on the site that later became the Flying Horse Inn (which I blipped some months ago).

In 1650, Huntingdon Plumptre renovated the property, raised the rents, and gave the widows a proper allowance: five shillings per month (£30.78 in 2015), with sixpence extra at New Year (£3.078 in 2015).

In the 1750s, another John Plumptre expanded the hospital so it could at last take the full 13 widows. They now received each year £13 10s (£1,092 in 2015), a gown and a tonne of coal, and in addition the New Year sixpence(£2.02 in 2015).

In the garden at the rear there is a plaque on the wall which reads 'Sufficit Meruisis' - 'it is enough to serve'.

Although the Plumptre family moved to Kent in 1756, they supported the charity by rebuilding the hospital again in 1823. Additional almshouses were built in Canal Street in 1956. (These were demolished around 2000).

By 1991, the charity no longer had the resources to improve Plumptre Hospital and its residents moved to the other almshouses. The building of 1823 was taken over by the Royal National Institute for the Blind in 2001 but is now office accommodation.