A smoker will learn more than a non-smoker about the labyrinth that is a hospital. Smokers understand its topography, its formal logic and the evolution of its architectures. They know its zones, sense its temperatures. They can tell you which badly-lit narrow corridor will lead back through the centuries to a hardly-used door opening onto an almost forgotten part of the complex. A courtyard, say, before a Georgian building, complete with blackened columns and porticos, a stoneworked inscription beneath the heavy wrought iron hands of its stopped clock letting on that this was once a fever hospital.
Smokers can tell you how to take a wrong turning down a dead end corridor so that you find yourself in an ornate chapel, extravagantly carpeted, all pristine gilt and high church plush, its lighting tastefully subdued. They know where there’s a semi-derelict room in the old wing – once a Victorian doctor’s common room, but now the visitors’ smoking space, left (pointedly) to reek like an ashtray.
Smokers know where all the fire escape stairs are, all the gantries and inner courtyards. They’ve found all the void spaces riddling this decaying honeycomb.
