Unexpected welcome

Redevelopment of the entrance to Southampton’s General Hospital has changed the face of the busy reception area for the hospital and vastly changing the first impressions visitors and patients alike now gain of the region’s major hospital.
Open plan reception, plenty of seating and a shopping mall make it much more akin in appearance to a travel terminal.
It’s purpose, of course, is far different, and I thought we had done with paying regular calls here  after my wife had an enforced stay here a few weeks ago.
So you can imagine our surprise, not to mention shock, at finding ourselves back here today, after what we had set out mid-morning imagining no more than a perhaps painful appointment with a dentist at our local dental surgery out of the city.
Within less than half an hour he had set up a follow-on call to the hospital. And here we were. Back again at the  city’s main University Hospital.
Not that we were in the mood to immediately appreciate the changes which had been brought about in the hospital entrance.

But sufficient to say, we might well have preferred it to be a travel terminal and that we had been about to leave on a jet plane.