The closure this week of the Nightingale Nursing Home in St Mary's Road, Manningham, ends another phase in the life of the building which opened on October 7, 1890 as Bradford Children's Hospital.

It stayed that way until July, 1987, when the children's hospital services transferred to St Luke's and the old hospital closed, to reopen two years later as a private nursing home.

During the near-century of its existence the Children's Hospital, with its distinctive round wards, touched the lives of most Bradford families across the generations. I spent a week in there in 1948 when I was four. My wife was incarcerated for seven weeks at the age of six after her appendix burst.

Visits from parents weren't allowed in those days. My wife's mother and father were only allowed to sneak into the ward and peep at her when she was asleep. When she was finally sent home she had become institutionalised and was virtually a stranger to her parents.

Things had improved a little by the end of the 1960s when our son, aged two, was twice admitted to the hospital in the middle of the night with acute asthma. In the days that followed we were allowed to sit at the side of his cot during visiting hours. We were tolerated but not made welcome. No-one, for instance, ever asked us if we'd like a cup of tea. The hospital's old-fashioned attitudes, established 80 years earlier, lingered on.

Bradford Children's Hospital began in a small way in 1862 when some women of the All Saints' Sisterhood - a London-based high Anglican guild - following their vocation of visiting the poor in the parish of St Jude's, ventured into the slummiest parts of that the area of Bradford then known as Black Abbey.

There they found a lot of sickly and ailing chidren who would benefit from being cared for in cleaner, more sanitary surroundings where they could be properly fed and nursed.

In the summer of 1863 they converted two houses in Hanover Square into a small hospital with a dozen beds and did all the nursing themselves, with the help of funds obtained largely from personal friends.

Their work soon started to attract attention. As the task grew it became obvious that help was needed. In 1884 a meeting was held at the Town Hall, presided over by the Mayor, Alderman Isaac Smith, at which a committee was appointed to take over the management of the hospital.

The committee was non-sectarian but the "sisters" continued to do all the work in the hospital, where the beds were always full.

In 1887 the committee acquired a large house in Springfield Place with room for twice the number of cots, and the hospital moved there later that year. It filled up almost immediately and a search began to find even more spacious accommodation.

The following year the committee managed to secure, for £3,000, a large site at the corner of St Mary's Road and Welbury Drive. Architects H & E Marten drew up plans for a new hospital with a central administrative block and two wings with circular wards. On May Day, 1889, Mr Samuel Cunliffe Lister, a.k.a. Lord Masham, laid the foundation stone. At the lunch at the Alexandra Hotel which followed he announced that he intended to give £5,000 towards the required £12,000.

The balance was greatly reduced because 18 months earlier the ladies of Bradford, with the building of a new hospital in mind, had raised the remarkable sum of £3,700 through a bazaar at St George's Hall which had subsequently been added to by subscription until it reached £5,000. So the committee had only £2,000 to find.

Even so, they had the foresight to realise that the running costs of such a large establishment would be considerable and decided that it would be unwise to build the whole thing at once. So when Lord Masham formally opened the hospital on October 7, 1890 it only had one round-warded wing - named the Samuel Cunliffe Lister Wing in honour of its benefactor. The other never got built.

Each of the two wards contained 25 cots arranged in a circle around the room. A cot was seldom empty for more than a day or two. The only qualification for admission was sickness and poverty. The charity's stated objectives were the medical and surgical treatment of the children of the poor.

A newspaper report in 1897 said that since the start in Hanover Square up to 3,000 children had been treated as in-patients, and since the medical staff began to treat out-patients in the house at Springfield Place between 8,000 and 9,000 had been entered on their books.

Many hundreds of thousands more, though not necessarily poor, enjoyed the medical care the staff at Bradford Children's Hospital provided over the decades until its doors closed in 1987.