London Duck Tours’ favourite Lady with the Lamp, Florence Nightingale, has had a museum here dedicated to her life story and the history of British Nursing on this site beside Westminster Bridge since 1989. As well as the story of the great lady herself, including some of her letters, books and clothing, the Florence Nightingale museum gives a history of the evolution of British nursing.
Florence Nightingale was a major reformer, innovator and campaigner for the improvement of the hospitals of the British Empire during mid Victorian England.
Within one short year of working at a hospital for Governesses in Cavendish Square, she totally recognised its outdated and unsafe working practises, reorganised its doctors, improved the menus, modernised its medical procedures, before leaving to work in the Crimea.
A slight woman, deemed to be of poor health before she started her reforming mission, Florence Nightingale’s lifetime workload, which included extraordinary efforts in the Crimea and writing hundreds of letters lobbying MPs to support and fund nursing reform, was almost superhuman.
