Workmen for Berkeley Homes are flattening the 170 year old Sandleford Hospital and 120 year old district hospital, after the NHS sold the land off earlier this year.

With rising unemployment as machines replaced farm labour in the Kennet Valley, the Sandleford workhouse was built in 1835 to deter the jobless from living off church donations.

Instead, the homeless, drunks, and mentally ill were sent in their hundreds from as far away as Boxford, Woolhampton, and Newtown, until 1895, when the system was scrapped, and it became a hospital.

The district hospital opened in 1885 after an appeal for public funds, and the first patients were the Irish navvies working on the Didcot to Southampton railway. Many of the workers lived in digs in the slum area behind the hospital.

The building was extended in 1914, to cope with the thousands of wounded men returning from the front in World War 1.

Dreweatt Neate sold both sites on behalf of the NHS earlier this year for £4 million. As part of the deal, social housing will be included on the Sandleford site, while the hospital site will become retirement flats for the elderly.