From the Guardian today:

Planned asylum seeker detention centre next to Oxfordshire sewage works criticised -Thames Water says detainees at proposed accommodation should expect to experience insect swarms and strong smells. A Home Office plan to build asylum seeker detention facilities next to a sewage pump is facing objections after water company officials warned that detainees should expect to experience insect swarms and strong smells.

Proposed secure accommodation blocks at Campsfield House immigration removal centre in Oxfordshire will be 20 metres from a sewage pumping station, according to a written submission [see in full at bottom ofpage] from Thames Water.

I agree fully that no asylum seekers should be accommodated close to sewage works. No one should, but for reasons not yet fully disclosed but with a very bad small around them, in 2002, not in the Victorian era, Glasgow City Council (Labour) and the Scottish Government (Labour) approved the building of a giant 1 000 plus bed hospital full of immuno-compromised patients, many children, next to and downwind of a giant sewage works, from the Victorian era. The staff car park is barely 5m from five sewage tanks, guaranteeing arriving staff, on any typically breezy West coast day, a bacteria shower before work.

I applaud the treatment of asylum seekers as human beings by why not the folk of Glasgow South too.

from reader Anonymous, 28 August 2026:

I don’t think even Prof R can quite accept the enormity of the situation.

The QEUH site was chosen by NHSGGC despite considerable opposition in 2000 and signed off by Labour’s Malcolm Chisholm in 2002.

Chaudhry Sarwar MP, father of his successor Anas (after the constituency boundaries changed) was the local MP. The Labour City Council finished the job.

PLUS look carefully at the above photos…where lower picture states “QEUH Facilities” (labs and mortuary btw) immediately above label are the final five settlement tanks still containing raw sewage – just look to your right as you walk towards the hospital, barely five metres from you.

Anything unprocessable has just been removed at the transfer station, the long corrugated roofed building, better seen in the top photograph where you can see all of the raw sewage feeder tanks on the far side of the labs/mortuary (at least ten of them).

The processing of this, the worst filth South Glasgow and surrounds can excrete, doesn’t take place until across Renfrew Road, where you can see the twelve (12) massive circular reprocessing ponds being stirred and to which more bacteria and flagellates are deliberately added to help the reprocessing!

But the massive quantities of raw shite are adjoining the hospital itself and all but ignored by the Scottish Hospitals Inquiry. Not to mention the household waste plant (a minor problem by comparison).

And then there’s the 350,000 tonnes per year of waste already in landfill now being dug up to be incinerated in the ‘South Clyde Energy Centre’ (reviving an old planning permission decision passed by the Labour Council in July 2012).

Statement 9. begs the real question. Where are the documents showing financial transactions at the Cowglen site? There is nowhere safe for us or our kids to go when ill. Even the Ross Hall Clinic at Braehead will be affected depending on wind direction…

The politicians cannot say they did not know.

‘Grotesquely misguided!’ How in 2000, a Glasgow doctor described the ‘bizarre’ decision to build the new Glasgow hospital next to multiple stinking sewage ponds in a clear and shaming indictment of Labour and the Herald since then

An aerated rotivated sludge pond like the 12, only 200 metres from the QEUH

The at least 29 raw sewage ponds upwind and horribly close to a giant hospital with thousands of vulnerable patients.

How the wind blows the sewage aerosols TO the wards.

Thanks to stewartb for finding these media reports including in particular the one from the Herald at the top of this, questioning the choice of site years before work began, approved by the Labour Glasgow City Council in 2004:

It’s notable how often media articles have made mention of the impact of the Shieldhall sewage works on air quality and health. These includes stories going back to its effects on patients at the old Southern General Hospital. So the architects and engineers designing and building the new ‘South Glasgow Hospital’ [and the councillors on the board, all Labour] would/should have been well aware of the local environmental challenges.

The Herald letter in 2 000 is a shocking indictment of the Labour Council’s decision and of the Herald’s volte face in now blaming the post-2008 SNP Scottish Government and post-2017 SNP council, for decisions made in 2004, under Labour at both council and national level.

I’m going to cut and paste much of it:

BSOME [building services operation and maintenance] correspondents in the consultation process on medical services in the South Side of Glasgow have mentioned the proximity of the sewage works at Shieldhall to the Southern General Hospital. I experienced the consequences of this bizarre siting when I practised there for over 20 years as an anaesthetist in the Institute of Neurological Sciences. Perhaps a dozen times each year that area was blanketed by a miasma of odour from the adjacent sewage works which was so powerful that staff were sometimes reduced to retching. Distinguished visitors from around the world, because we were an internationally recognised neurosciences unit, were bemused.

In the neurosurgical operating theatres, an enormous amount of money and effort had been spent achieving cleanliness and sterility, as this was where patients’ brains and spines were to be exposed. The smell of shit, or human excrement if you like, was evident everywhere. Not even the expensive and efficient air-conditiong apparatus was able to prevent the entry of this disgusting smell. The paradox of staff being dressed in sterile clothing, using instruments autoclaved to sterility, and practising painstaking techniques of sterile procedures on desperately ill patients in this revolting atmosphere was not lost.

The long letter finishes with:

I’m in danger of becoming obsessed about this but it’s bloody important that Labour do not find a way to pass the blame here.

Stephen Purcell, Council Leader in 2008, accused of corruption and links with gangsters during his time as Leader of Glasgow City Council – https://www.scotsman.com/news/police-warned-steven-purcell-about-gangster-link-2471476

Finally, I cannot find DR J R Donald anywhere but have found Dr J. R. Donaldson (often styled J.R. Donaldson) was a bacteriologist/microbiologist affiliated with the University of Glasgow’s Department of Bacteriology (including the Wolfson Centre) in the 1980s. He co-authored papers on Legionnaires’ disease outbreaks in Glasgow. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2082894/

Was that a typo? Donaldson fits the bill well. If that was a letter from a published bacteriologist/microbiologist, then it further shocks that he was ignored by a gang of Labour councillors. You have to wonder what was in it for them.

How did it happen?

By Scunhur

A J Cronin, best selling novelist and doctor, lived at 29 Esmond St Yorkhill during his latter school years and throughout University studies which were interrupted by WW1 service.

Cowglen should have been the site of the new Glasgow Southside hospital campus but Cowglen is all lucrative housing now.

Here’s where it ended up:

My understanding is that Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL https://www.jll.com/en-uk/), a global real estate services company headquartered in Chicago but with offices in 80 countries, brokered a split-ownership sale between the National Savings Bank (NSB) and NHSGGC (the former Cowglen Hospital site) on one side and Persimmon Homes on the other in 2015 with sale completion in January 2016.

It was hard to get those details. The figure of £9,458,000 is touted but possibly for only one of the sale sites. https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/atos_scotland_delivery_locations.

It’s difficult to believe that protestors against site next to the huge sewage works in the (then) GGHB mock consultation on the issue in 2000 and subsequent GGHB/Lib-Lab decisions were told that the iconic NSB building could never be knocked down…until it was.

They were also told that the recently built M77 on/off ramps at Barrhead Road could never be reconstructed…until they were – for Silverburn.

Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) are also responsible for the impending sale of The Queen Mother’s and RHSC Yorkhill, 22 acre site which is currently in ‘pre-sale’ marketing https://invest-glasgow.foleon.com/igpubs/glasgow-pitchbook/yorkhill-hospital-campus.

This might be on the market now. I’m not sure but it was not sold as of end October 2026. Ironically, the eastern border of the plot, where the main entrance and exit for the former hospital campus were, is Esmond Street, in the middle of which is the one-time family home of A J Cronin, himself a physician and author of ‘The Citadel’, a book said to have been part of the inspiration for the NHS and which excoriates medical hypocrisy and ‘private’ practice.

What does Cronin mean by ‘The Citadel?’

The entrenched medical establishment and system. The title also evokes the hidebound, resistant, and sometimes corrupt structures of early 20th-century British medicine—the “fortress” of traditionalism, professional privilege, and systemic inequities that Manson (and Cronin himself) criticizes. Cronin wrote that the book expressed “all I feel about the medical profession, its injustices, its hide-bound unscientific stubbornness, its humbug… This is not an attack against individuals, but against a system.”

The Sick Children’s Hospital moved from 45 Scott St. Garnethill to Yorkhill in 1914, the same year as AJ moved from his school at Garnethill to become a medical student at Glasgow University. What on Earth would AJ make of the relocation of the Children’s and Maternity/Neonatal Hospitals from the relatively bucolic site at Yorkhill to the sewage surrounded Shieldhall cesspit 101 years later? What novel would he write? ‘The Shitadel’?”

Appendix: Full Thames Water advice:

Source: https://find-crown-development.planninginspectorate.gov.uk/applications/2975807a-d3d7-4961-ba63-4e808de37b5a/written-representations/4AA94-12187