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Noho? No way. Let’s call the hospital flats Nightingale Square
• AS a Camden resident for more than 30 years, I am shocked and saddened to learn of the Candy brothers’ proposal to brand their development of our beloved old Middlesex Hospital site as Noho Square, with its connotations of the Soho brothel area (Look out Fitzrovia, here comes Noho, March 6).
There are good reasons for renaming it Nightingale Square. Florence nursed there. Internationally venerated, her name would provide a better tourist attraction than trying to duplicate Soho’s deviant ones.
Our area is graced by historic hospitals and medical institutions. Tourist walkabouts could refresh jaded travellers, especially if they take in the listed chapel, a central space in the old hospital, which planners say must be kept open to the public.
Above all, it would be more pleasant for new residents, especially families with children in the planned affordable housing, to be able to say they lived in Nightingale Square, rather than be linked with Noho. Women, especially, would appreciate the area being given a feminine name, and, who knows, in any planned green space nightingales might even come and sing!
YVONNE CRAIG
Ridgmount Gardens, WC1
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