Artwork celebrates Brunel’s pop-up Crimean hospital and Florence Nightingale

A piece of art featuring Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s design plans for a Crimean War pop-up hospital has gone on display in Bristol.

Brunel designed Renkioi Hospital in six days after pleas from Florence Nightingale to help improve poor sanitation in field hospitals.

The wooden structure was made in England and erected in Crimea in 1855.

The artwork’s creator, Jacqueline Braithwaite, said it was “mindblowing” to see it at SS Great Britain’s Dockyard Museum in Bristol, where it is being exhibited as part of the charity’s Community Research programme.

Ms Braithwaite’s work features images of the hospital plans printed on a large piece of cloth, overlapped with images of maps, boats and the faces of three “independent and influential women” of the time – Florence Nightingale, Mary Seacole and Frances Duberly.

“They were all pioneering women. That’s important for young people today to learn about, and even for older people,” Ms Braithwaite said.

Florence Nightingale is considered the founder of modern nursing, while Mary Seacole built a hotel in Crimea to help treat soldiers. Her offers of help had been rejected twice, so she had funded her own journey to the warzone.

Frances Duberly, meanwhile, wrote letters and diaries from Crimea, making her the first recorded female war correspondent.

The war was fought by an alliance of Britain, France, Turkey and Sardinia against Russia between 1853 and 1856.

Ms Braithwaite, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a former college head of design, also took inspiration from the 75th anniversary of both the NHS and Windrush Day in 2023.

Speaking about Mary Seacole, she said: “She was a Jamaican black woman so it fitted in beautifully with the NHS and Windrush anniversaries, bringing it all together in the same piece.”

Ms Braithwaite said she wanted her design to be printed on cloth so it could be made into a stretcher, representing the soldiers who had been carried away from battle, but also so that it could be folded up and taken to schools.

“I wanted children to be able sit around the big cloth – like a big throw – and for them to be able to touch it,” she said.

As a proud mother and carer of an adult daughter with autism, she added that she was “very proactive” in speaking up for those with additional needs, which she considered when creating her work.

“[The artwork] is for able and differently abled people to interact with, it doesn’t matter where you live or what you are, it’s flexible and I know that’s how I need to tell stories,” she added.