When I was a teenager I read The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, and his description of the enclosed and fevered atmosphere of a fictional sanatorium has stayed with me ever since. Most of the patients - and Castorp, the main protagonist - are being treated at the hospital because they are suffering from TB, a disease which at the time was often incurable. (It was TB that killed the great short story writer, Katherine Mansfield, when she was just 34 years old.) Mann wrote his book having visited his wife in Davos in 1912. 

I thought of the Magic Mountain last week, when I went on a training day at Bronllys Hospital near Brecon in Mid Wales.  The hospital was built as a TB sanatorium and consists of a complex of low buildings built in the Arts and Crafts style. According to Pevsner, the architects were Edward and Stanley Hall, and the works were finished in 1920.

Here's the Payroll building - looking a bit blurry because I snapped it with my phone in the dinner hour. 

 

 

 

 

 

The main treatment for TB was fresh air, so outside the wards verandah's were built.  Beds were pushed outside in all weathers. The verandahs  form long walkways between the old wards.

This is the canteen, a building made light by its many windows.